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The American Prospect - articles by authorenWhere the Republican Party Beganhttps://prospect.org/article/where-republican-party-began
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<p>Lincoln in 1860 and Stephen A. Douglas in 1859. It was in refuting Douglas that Lincoln awakened his own greatness. </p>
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<p align="left"><a href="http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Wrestling-With-His-Angel/Sidney-Blumenthal/The-Political-Life-of-Abraham-Lincoln/9781501153785">Wrestling with His Angel: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II, 1849-1856</a><br /><em>By Sidney Blumenthal<br />Simon &amp; Schuster</em></p>
<p align="left"><em>This article appears in the Fall 2017 issue of </em>The American Prospect <em>magazine. <a href="http://www.prospect.org/subscribe">Subscribe here</a>. </em></p>
<p><span class="dropcap">B</span>efore Sidney Blumenthal was a sharp-elbowed political operative for Bill and Hillary Clinton, he was a sharp-eyed political journalist. In <em>Wrestling with His Angel</em>, his new book on Abraham Lincoln, Blumenthal returns to those roots. He applies to the 1850s, with rewarding effect, the analytical insight and stylistic elegance that made him an indispensable writer in the 1980s on the rise of Ronald Reagan–era conservatism and the Democratic struggle to formulate a winning response. And although Blumenthal never steps out of the historical frame to compare Lincoln’s time with our own, his story of how the pounding pressure of unrelenting partisan and regional conflict tore apart and reconfigured a seemingly immutable party system in the 1850s offers important insights into the ways today’s deep fissures might forge a new political alignment.</p>
<p><em>Wrestling with His Angel</em>, which covers the years 1849 through 1856, is the second volume in a projected four-book series that amounts to a political life and times for Lincoln. Here Blumenthal very much stresses “the times.” Lincoln vanishes for long stretches; Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln’s lifelong rival, dominates most of the narrative. That emphasis reflects the contrasting trajectories of the two men. The book captures Lincoln at low ebb, returning to a middling (at best) law practice in Illinois after serving a single term as a Whig in the House of Representatives.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Douglas was at high tide. In these years, he was a dynamic (if coarse and sometimes booze-addled) young Democratic senator who seized the baton from the tiring Henry Clay to drive the Compromise of 1850 into law. Just four years later, Douglas passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act that repealed the seemingly impregnable Missouri Compromise and opened new states to slavery if their residents voted to allow it. After that triumph, Blumenthal writes, “Douglas had risen so far that Lincoln disappeared from his view. Five years gone from Washington, Lincoln was left to observe the tail of the comet.”</p>
<p>Yet Douglas’s seeming triumph precipitated the reversal of the two men’s fortunes. The cause of rallying opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska law, among the most misguided legislation ever passed by Congress, roused Lincoln “from his dormancy,” as Blumenthal writes, and returned him to center stage in Illinois politics. Just six years after Douglas’s great legislative victory, Lincoln soundly defeated him for the presidency, as the nominee of a new party that emerged precisely from the ferocious Northern backlash against the Kansas-Nebraska law and the attempt to impose a proslavery constitution on Kansas.</p>
<p>Many excellent books have recounted the destabilization of American politics and the march toward the Civil War in the 1850s, and many others have tracked Lincoln’s own journey toward greatness. Blumenthal inevitably operates in the shadow of the finest of these (such as David Potter’s magisterial <em>The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861</em> or Eric Foner’s <em>Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men</em> on the rise of the Republican Party). Blumenthal makes his contribution to this bulging literature by employing his skills as a political reporter to focus on politicians and their maneuvering. He provides captivating miniature portraits of the era’s dominant political figures, from a spidery, syphilitic Jefferson Davis scheming to strengthen the South as President Franklin Pierce’s secretary of war, to Missouri’s titanic Thomas Hart Benton thundering maledictions against his many enemies. (Benton, in floor debate, described Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act as “a silent, secret, limping, halting, creeping, squinting, impish motion.”) Blumenthal applies a surprisingly bright coat of paint to the truncated presidency of Zachary Taylor, whom he portrays as a tough-minded unionist who stared down Southern threats before dying of cholera in office.</p>
<p>At times, Blumenthal gets lost in the weeds (literally, when recounting the battles of Thurlow Weed and William Seward with an array of rivals for control of the Whig Party in New York). His lengthy account of the political struggles between pro- and anti-slavery forces in Kentucky is vibrant but overwhelming in its dense detail. And while reviewers must always be careful about criticizing authors for not writing a different book, I believe Blumenthal would have benefited from a greater discussion of the economic forces that were also dividing a rapidly industrializing North from the agrarian South (and advantaging the former over the latter in the war to come).</p>
<p>Yet Blumenthal’s focus on the era’s political leadership offers its own rewards. It allows him to show how the sectional divide subsumed all other political issues and disputes. In the 1850s, slavery was the rock on which every institution in American life shattered. Churches, civic groups, even the two major national political parties, all sundered across the North/South boundary.</p>
<p>Much like Potter, Blumenthal shows how the intensifying conflict over slavery—or more precisely over whether slavery would be allowed to spread into new states—disrupted the alignment that had shaped U.S. politics for decades. Since the 1830s, American politics had revolved around the competition between Whigs and Democrats. The Whigs generally represented the merchant class and supported an activist role for government in creating the conditions for economic growth through initiatives such as building roads and canals, while Democrats rallied behind Andrew Jackson’s banner of smaller government, territorial expansion, and championing of the common (white) man. But those differences became secondary—first to leaders and then to voters—to the all-consuming question of whether to limit the expansion of slavery (especially after the Mexican-American War of 1848 forced Washington to decide whether slavery would be allowed in the vast new territories acquired in the conflict, including New Mexico and California).</p>
<p>With both parties divided between Northern and Southern wings, neither could meet the demands of many voters in the North for a party unambiguously opposed to the spread of slavery (if not its abolition in the states where it already existed).</p>
<p>The Compromise of 1850 had heightened the sectional tensions in each party, particularly by including the Fugitive Slave Act, which morally outraged many in the North. But the traditional partisan loyalties still survived that shock. Both parties stumbled through the presidential election of 1852 clinging to their old differences and hoping to sublimate the mounting tension over slavery’s future. That year, as Blumenthal pointedly notes, both the Democrat and Whig platforms endorsed the Fugitive Slave Act, effectively disenfranchising the many Northerners opposed to it.</p>
<p>For Lincoln, the 1852 election may have been the personal low point as he sought to promote the lackluster Whig nominee Winfield Scott while abiding his party’s silence on the issues that consumed him. “He argued for no principles, upheld no cause and offered no serious discussion of any issue,” Blumenthal writes of Lincoln’s limp electioneering that year. “He permitted not a glimmer to show of his inner turmoil over the problem of slavery, the conflict of North and South, and the country’s future.”</p>
<p>The breaking point for this fraying party system came just two years later when Douglas pushed through his Kansas-Nebraska Act. His aim was not specifically to expand slavery, but he was willing to allow its spread to advance his deeper goal: to organize those vast territories so they could become the route for a transcontinental railroad that he anticipated would both enrich him (he had a habit of commingling his legislation and investments) and propel him to the presidency. Douglas believed that shifting the debate over slavery’s extension to the individual states would suppress the North-South conflict and allow him to emerge along a different axis as the champion of an expanding and modernizing America. As Blumenthal vigorously writes, Douglas “advertised himself as the herald of the future, the maker of the new age and front-runner of his generation—the political engine of the piston-driven forces of modernization.”</p>
<p>In fact, the Kansas-Nebraska Act had the opposite effect. Rather than suppressing the regional conflict, the act furiously inflamed it. Its mandate for popular sovereignty was virtually an invitation to civil war, as anti- and pro-slavery forces descended on Kansas to control the writing of its constitution. By Douglas’s own count, more than 1,500 sermons were preached against him in New England churches after the law’s passage. In the election of 1854, 84 percent of all Northern House Democrats who voted for the law were defeated. That rout tilted the party’s balance of power decisively toward the South and pushed it even more toward a pro-slavery stance that, in a reinforcing cycle, further undermined its standing in the North.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, with its Southern elements supporting the Kansas-Nebraska Act while its Northern leaders recoiled, the Whig Party “shattered into pieces under the stress,” as Blumenthal writes. An array of anti-Nebraska, fusion, temperance, and nativist parties initially filled the void while Whig stalwarts like Seward and Lincoln tried to hold their party together. But by 1856, the Whigs were effectively defunct and the Republican Party had emerged as a Northern party clearly opposed to slavery’s expansion. Lincoln formally joined the party in May 1856, just days after a pro-slavery militia sacked the town of Lawrence, Kansas, and John Brown retaliated with a massacre of five pro-slavery men in Pottawatomie Creek. “Each and every one of Douglas’s clever maneuvers would bring slavery to the forefront again,” Blumenthal concludes, “but on a basis more contentious than ever.”</p>
<p>In this rising conflict, Lincoln rediscovered his purpose. In a preview of their epic confrontations during the 1858 Senate race, Lincoln trailed Douglas around Illinois during the 1854 election. Though the two never directly debated, Lincoln’s speeches offered the first rough drafts of the piercing arguments he would deploy in 1858 against Douglas’s morally agnostic approach to slavery. (Lincoln’s core argument in 1854 was that Douglas’s claim to support popular sovereignty required listeners to deny the humanity of the slaves: “[I]f the negro is a man, is it not to that extent, a total destruction of self-government, to say that he too shall not govern himself?”) It was in refuting Douglas that Lincoln awakened his own greatness—a metamorphosis sure to dominate Blumenthal’s next volume.</p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">Lincoln was a singular figure who combined moral courage with shrewd tactical insight, bottomless perseverance, and unmatched literary gifts. </span>His personal story offers limited guidance to succeeding generations because the hyperactive modern political system is not likely to produce such a transcendent figure again—and probably would not recognize him or her if it did.</p>
<p>Yet the crisis of the 1850s that Blumenthal recreates so vividly here remains worthy of study because it represents the last time a major new party emerged in the United States. The Republican Party took root in the space between the anachronistic terms of political debate between Whigs and Democrats and the evolving nature of the nation’s most pressing political conflict. As the sectional struggle washed over the old political boundaries, the Republican Party coalesced the forces opposed to slavery that had been submerged in both of the existing parties. Sweeping away older issues and alignments, the GOP’s rise refocused the political debate onto the central issue of the time (the fate of slavery) and reset the partisan configuration around society’s most important division (the North/South regional split).</p>
<p>The mismatch isn’t as great today, but once again the nature of the party competition no longer fully reflects the country’s actual divisions. Democrats and Republicans mostly think of themselves in a mold stamped during the New Deal, with Democrats as the party of working people and Republicans as the party of the economic elite. In fact, the parties now separate less along class lines than in their attitudes toward the fundamental demographic, cultural, and economic changes remaking American society. Democrats mobilize what I’ve called a “coalition of transformation” that revolves primarily around millennials, minorities, and college-educated whites who are generally the most comfortable with increasing diversity, greater social inclusion, and the transition to a post-industrial, globalized (and low-carbon) economy. Republicans rely on a competing “coalition of restoration” centered on older, blue-collar, non-urban, and evangelical whites most resistant to these same changes.</p>
<p>By appealing more explicitly to white racial identity than any national figure since George Wallace, Donald Trump has both exploited and intensified the separation of the parties along these cultural and racial lines. In 2016, Trump won a higher share of non-college white voters than any candidate in either party since Ronald Reagan in 1984, while facing huge deficits among minorities and millennials and nearly becoming the first Republican nominee in the history of polling to lose most college-educated whites. Trump’s unflinchingly polarizing and racially divisive agenda is increasing the pressure on the outliers in each coalition: the remaining culturally conservative blue-collar white Democrats drawn toward aspects of Trump’s insular nationalism, and the white-collar Republicans who like the party’s anti-tax, anti-regulation agenda but are uneasy with Trump’s repeated gestures to white racial resentment.</p>
<p>Amid his daily chaos, Trump is now losing support on all sides. But if Trump can stabilize his presidency he may well lure more blue-collar whites (though probably not working-class minorities) from the Democrats at the price of driving more white-collar whites toward them. The end result might be two parties contrasted even more clearly than they are today by their attitudes toward social and economic change, and perhaps a serious third-party contender in 2020 filling the space between them. As Blumenthal demonstrates in his compelling history of Lincoln, Douglas, and the Cold War between North and South through the 1850s, once such a process of partisan recombination begins, no one can be entirely sure where it will end.</p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 22 Nov 2017 10:00:00 +0000228531 at https://prospect.orgRonald BrownsteinReady to Rumblehttps://prospect.org/article/ready-rumble
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><blockquote><p><b><a href="http://americanprospect.bookswelike.net/isbn/1594201331">The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics</a></b> by Matt Bai <i>(The Penguin Press, 316 pages, $25.95)</i></p></blockquote>
<p>Not since Watergate has the electoral landscape appeared as favorable for Democrats as it does today. All polls show gale-force discontent with the country's direction under President Bush (he recently received the second highest disapproval rating Gallup has ever recorded in seven decades of measuring attitudes about presidential performance). From the 2008 presidential candidates to the party campaign committees, Democrats are consistently outraising Republicans. Even the electoral calendar is cooperating: Democrats next year must defend only 12 Senate seats compared to 22 for Republicans, including seven in blue or Democrat-trending states where disillusionment with Bush and the Iraq War is most intense. Not all trends, though, are as positive for the party. Many Democratic strategists understandably remain uneasy about Congress' sinking approval ratings and the mixed performances by the leading 2008 Democratic presidential hopefuls in head-to-head polls against the top Republican candidates. But overall, it seems more relevant than it has in many years to ask how Democrats would govern if provided unified control of Congress and the White House. </p>
<p>Into that breach steps Matt Bai, a talented writer and reporter for <i>The New York Times Magazine</i> with an entertaining account of the Democratic Party's search for direction in the Bush years. Bai has produced a political history at the ground level, if the ground level is defined to include the penthouse. He believes the most important contemporary development in the Democratic Party is the emergence of a diffuse movement—ranging from rich coastal liberals to the dispersed activists who find community on liberal Web sites such as the Daily Kos—united in the belief that the party since the early 1990s has faltered before the challenge of an ascendant conservatism. In <i>The Argument</i>, he takes readers on a tour through this political uprising, traveling from East Coast to West to spend time with key figures such as Rob Stein, a restless former Clinton administration aide who organized wealthy Democrats to fund a liberal alternative to the conservative political "infrastructure" constructed since the 1970s; Markos Moulitsas Zúniga and Jerome Armstrong, pioneers of liberal Internet activism; Howard Dean, the insurgent presidential candidate turned renegade party chairman; Andy Stern, the thoughtful Service Employees International Union president laboring to modernize not only liberalism but organized labor; and Ned Lamont, the wealthy antiwar businessman who, shooting star–like, beat Joe Lieberman for the Democratic Senate nomination in Connecticut last year, but then lost the general election to him. </p>
<p>This approach yields many insights and some wonderfully told tales. The diversity, passion, and distance from conventional power of Bai's cast allows him to illuminate the challenges facing Democrats from some fresh angles. But that strength is also the book's weakness: Ultimately most of the characters Bai chooses are too peripheral to tell the story he tries to load onto their backs. <i>The Argument</i>, like a plane endlessly circling the runway, approaches but never quite reaches the toughest choices that the Democrats confront. </p>
<p>Still, Bai is an excellent writer and reporter with a deft touch for revealing character and a reliable gift for crafting memorable phrases. Howard Dean's "scream" speech after the Iowa caucus in 2004, he writes, was "like a man trying his damnedest to give an upbeat toast at his ex-wife's wedding." Bai admiringly describes one grassroots activist as "the kind of woman who would think nothing of climbing a chain-link fence in heels." He has an easy way with a story, too, which he displays to great effect through long set pieces like a car ride from Los Angeles to San Francisco with Armstrong and Moulitsas, and a gripping confrontation between an enraged Bill Clinton and a wealthy liberal at a private conference of big Democratic donors that Bai industriously wormed his way into. </p>
<p>Bai also offers three-dimensional profiles of his subjects. He clearly likes almost everyone he writes about and finds them idealistic, thoughtful, and fun. But he's hardly blind to their flaws; the reader leaves the book with the sense that by the time Bai finished he didn't admire many of them quite as much as he expected to. His portrait of Moulitsas, the brash founder of the eponymous Daily Kos, is especially edgy; Bai appears to see him as more operator than idealist. He pauses the book's On the Road section with Armstrong and Moulitsas to make sure we're aware that Moulitsas doesn't recognize the name of Pat Caddell, the enfant terrible strategist who helped shape the presidential campaigns of Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Gary Hart in 1984 and also lingers on the fact that Moulitsas hasn't read two books directly related to subjects on which he opines with great passion. It's the authorial equivalent of a raised eyebrow. </p>
<p>Bai gets plenty of the big things right, too. He's correct to argue that the diverse liberal movements that blossomed in opposition to Bush have invigorated the left wing of the Democratic Party more than anything since the antiwar, civil-rights, environmental, and feminist movements of the 1960s and early 1970s. "More than at any time since the 1960s," he writes, "the party and its leading politicians were being forced to respond and adapt to a popular movement beyond their control." And he's equally correct to argue that although this movement leans left, its motivation is more partisan than ideological. "To the extent that a single philosophy united all of [these] people," he writes, "it wasn't any kind of governing agenda for the country. Rather, the netroots stood chiefly for the principle of unyielding partisanship … According to the blogger ethos, Republicans, whether staunchly conservative or not, were to be stomped, beaten, and generally humiliated. And any Democrat who didn't pursue that goal … needed to be taught a lesson." </p>
<p>Bai shares this movement's disdain for the Washington Democratic establishment (which he sees as timid and cautious), and he generally views both the activists in the suburban tract homes and the rich donors in the houses on the hill as rejuvenating influences in a party desperately in need of them. Yet, characteristically, Bai is also keenly aware of the movement's limitations, such as a studied, even defiant, aversion to history. To most bloggers, he writes, anything that had occurred before Bill Clinton's impeachment in 1998 "felt as ancient … as the underlying causes of the Peloponnesian War, and about as useful." He doesn't blink at the pettiness and arrogance displayed by many of the Democracy Alliance's benevolent plutocrats. And he wearies of the movement's elevation of tactics over substance, and its demand for unrelenting, unconditional political warfare, writing sympathetically about Barack Obama's amazement after he generated a ferocious backlash from Kos readers with a plea for more tolerance of diverse views within the Democratic coalition and greater outreach to those voters and interests outside of it. </p>
<p>In all these ways <i>The Argument</i> has much to teach anyone interested in the modern Democratic Party. Yet overall the book is less illuminating than it might have been. Part of the problem is that several of Bai's subjects fizzle out. Any author who tries to tell a contemporary story by following individual characters is in a situation similar to a wildcatter drilling for oil. Bai, alas, hits a few dry holes: The Democracy Alliance mostly spins its wheels; Lamont loses; Jerome Armstrong's 2008 presidential candidate (former Virginia Governor Mark Warner) doesn't run. These characters' experiences today don't seem as central to the Democrats' future as Bai probably expected when he chose them. For all of the book's considerable virtues, trying to understand the modern Democratic Party through <i>The Argument</i> is a bit like trying to understand Hamlet through <i>Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.</i> </p>
<p>The larger problem is that Bai never establishes a clear, or even consistent, perspective on the debates over the party's direction. On the one hand, Bai eloquently argues that after the 1960s too many Democrats worshiped "a batch of statutes"—programs such as welfare or affirmative action—that they refused to rethink despite evidence that they alienated voters and achieved, at best, only equivocal results. He persuasively compares the Democratic Party of that era to General Motors, unable to adapt to a new generation that simply was no longer attracted to its products. The most consistent note in the book is Bai's yearning for Democrats to boldly rethink their agenda and produce "transformative solutions" that respond to the challenges of the Information Age as the Progressives and New Dealers responded to the demands of America's industrial revolution. In all these arguments, Bai sounds like nothing so much as Bill Clinton and the "New Democrats" of the 1990s who insisted that the party needed new means to advance its traditional priority of expanding opportunity. </p>
<p>But simultaneously, and much too casually, Bai accepts the bloggers' cartoon version of Clinton's presidency. Although he doesn't fully identify with the sentiment himself, Bai sympathetically quotes liberal critics who argue that Clinton "had stripped the party of its moral authority, and … brought the country itself to the edge of ruin." If so, ruin had relocated to some pretty tony neighborhoods. During Clinton's eight years, the country experienced the largest decline in poverty since the 1960s, a 15 percent increase in the median income (with African Americans and Hispanics recording much bigger gains than whites), massive job creation, and the first federal surpluses in three decades, not to mention improving social indicators such as declining crime rates. Bai doesn't grapple with any of that. Nor does he assess, in anything more than a fleeting reference, Clinton's efforts to rethink traditional liberalism—exactly what Bai urges the Democratic Party to do today. Clinton's signature ideas—balancing opportunity with responsibility and government activism with fiscal discipline; rewarding work; coupling support for free trade with expanded education and training—aren't all still relevant for a Democratic Party hardened by two terms of brutal combat with Bush and congressional Republicans. But Bai makes little effort to think about what in that legacy should be saved, and what discarded. By failing to do so, he commits the sin for which he correctly chides the netroots: slighting history. </p>
<p>Bai's plea for a more ambitious, transformative Democratic agenda, also seems disconnected in another key respect. Visionary ideas detached from a strategy to move them into law are like balloons without strings. (As John F. Kennedy once put it when an aide urged him to promote a policy he knew he could not pass through Congress, "That's vanity … not politics.") But Bai never decides whether he believes the new liberal movement is correct that Democrats can achieve sustained power and impose a sweeping agenda through a deliberately polarizing politics primarily aimed at motivating their base, or whether they must find ideas that can attract broad support across party lines, even if that means some conflict with the party base. Through his criticism of Clinton, Bai seems dubious of the latter strategy, but he also recognizes the limitations of the former. As he should: Bush's disastrous second term has demonstrated that not only the country but a political party itself loses when it aims its agenda almost solely at its core supporters. But Bai's characters don't fully think through this basic choice, and he doesn't rise above them enough to do so, either. </p>
<p>Yet outside the scope of Bai's book, in the early stages of the 2008 presidential race, that rethinking does seem to be occurring and heading toward a strikingly pragmatic resolution. John Edwards, reviving some of Dean's 2004 arguments, has denounced Clintonesque triangulation and insisted the party cannot win without bold liberal proposals. But after seven years of battle with Bush, none of the other candidates—or for that matter, most early state Democratic voters—seem to have much stomach for a full-fledged ideological showdown. Instead, Obama, Hillary Clinton, and most of the remaining contenders are constructing agendas that echo Bill Clinton through themes of personal responsibility and fiscal discipline, but also reflect the Democrats' expanding sense of opportunity with proposals on health care, energy, and education more liberal than those Clinton advanced after his first term. Compared to the Clinton years, in other words, the candidates are tilting left, but not as far left as Bush tilted to the right. More reliant on the votes of moderate voters, Democrats are necessarily less attentive than Republicans to the demands of their ideological base. </p>
<p>The conflicts between that ardent base and more consensus-oriented Democrats—<i>The Argument</i> that inspires so much passion among Bai's subjects—inevitably would resurface if the party wins the White House next year. (If either Obama or Hillary Clinton is elected, their shared instinct to seek consensus could inspire many of the same complaints heard in the book about Bill Clinton.) But for now, the fight among the 2008 Democrats is less about where the party should go than about who best can take it there. Bai might have captured more of that somewhat surprising dynamic if he had included among his characters some insiders—congressional leaders or a presidential candidate—actually weighing these considerations as they set their course. </p>
<p>It would be a mistake to dwell too long on these limitations of <i>The Argument</i>, because the strengths of its reporting and writing greatly outweigh them. Bai's coverage of the 2004 presidential campaign was fresh and distinct. This book underscores his emergence as an important new voice in the political dialogue, with keen insights and an engaging way of expressing them. As a writer, he's always fun to spend time with. And if he didn't really answer the most difficult questions facing the Democratic Party, well, he has plenty of company in that. He's sure to get a few more chances, because, while it may be in abeyance now, <i>The Argument</i> isn't ending any time soon.</p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 10 Aug 2007 23:06:04 +0000146529 at https://prospect.orgRonald BrownsteinHow the South Rose Againhttps://prospect.org/article/how-south-rose-again-0
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><blockquote><p><b>When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America</b> by Ira Katznelson (<i>W.W. Norton, 238 pages, $25.95</i>)</p></blockquote>
<blockquote><p><b>The White House Looks South</b> by William E. Leuchtenburg (<i>Louisiana State University Press, 668 pages, $45.00</i>)</p></blockquote>
<blockquote><p><b>White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism</b> by (<i>Kevin M. Kruse Princeton University Press, 325 pages, $35.00</i>)</p></blockquote>
<blockquote><p><b>The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South</b> by Byron E. Shafer and Richard Johnston (<i>Harvard University Press, 240 pages, $39.95</i>)</p></blockquote>
<p>
Nothing has contributed more to the conservative ascendancy in American politics than the realignment of the South from solidly Democratic to reliably Republican. The South now furnishes the decisive votes for Republican control of the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the White House. Outside the South, Democrats still hold the advantage in the competition on all three fronts. But the Republican dominance of the South has grown so pronounced that it swamps the Democratic strengths elsewhere and provides the GOP with its margin of majority for both Congress and the White House.</p>
<p>Consider the Senate. In the 11 states of the old Confederacy plus Oklahoma and Kentucky -- the generally accepted political definition of the South -- Republicans hold 22 of the 26 Senate seats. In the rest of the country, Democrats control seven more Senate seats than the GOP. But that's not nearly enough to offset the lopsided Republican advantage in the South.</p>
<p>The same is true in the House. Outside the South, Democrats hold a 152-140 edge in House seats. But the GOP's 40-seat cushion in the South ensures that Illinois Republican Denny Hastert holds the speaker's gavel, not San Francisco Democrat Nancy Pelosi.<br />
The imbalance is even more pronounced in the race for the White House. In 2000, Al Gore won just over 70 percent of the Electoral College votes at stake outside the South. But George W. Bush narrowly won the White House because he swept all 165 Electoral College votes in the 13 southern states. Four years later, John Kerry won 68 percent of the Electoral College votes outside the South. But Bush won because he again swept the 13 Southern states -- this time worth 168 Electoral College votes after population growth measured in the 2000 Census.</p>
<p>Democrats might someday cobble together a congressional or presidential majority with such limited southern support; Republicans, after all, frequently did precisely that from the 1880s to the 1920s. But it is never easy to overcome such a preponderant advantage in one region, as Republicans learned when the “solid-South” underpinned Democratic dominance in Washington for nearly four decades after the New Deal. One of the clearest lessons of the past decade is that Democrats will always face an uphill climb to power if they can't perform at least somewhat better in the South.</p>
<p></p><center> * * * </center>
<p>Like all other aspects of southern life, southern politics beguiles writers. The South has probably inspired more classic works of political science and political history (think V.O. Key Jr. or C. Vann Woodward) than any other region, not to mention the greatest novel ever written about American politics, Robert Penn Warren's <i>All The King's Men</i>. The fascination with the South is, in one sense, odd because for almost a full century after the Civil War, little ostensibly changed in a southern political system built around the twin exclusion of African Americans and Republicans. But novelists and historians alike have found irresistible material in the sweat and bombast, the intransigence and fear that characterized southern politics under segregation, and the electoral earthquakes that have reshaped the region since.</p>
<p>Three new books join this lengthy shelf. Each approaches the story from a distinctive angle. <i>The White House Looks South</i> by the respected historian (and adopted Southerner) William E. Leuchtenburg, is a conversational and discursive exploration of how Democratic Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Lyndon Johnson managed, mollified, submitted to, and confronted the South. This is more a meditation on these presidents than a systematic analysis of them. Leuchtenburg quotes other writers too much and presents too few specifics, yet his command of this history is so strong, and the story itself so powerful, that this often-meandering book courses at times with propulsive power. </p>
<p><i>The End of Southern Exceptionalism</i> by Byron E. Shafer and Richard Johnston examines this history literally by the numbers. It is a work of hard-core quantitative political science that advances several provocative arguments but will probably put off anyone who isn't eager to decipher discussions about a “multinomial logistic regression converted to a probability distribution.”</p>
<p>In contrast, historian Kevin M. Kruse illuminates the story at ground level. <i>In White Flight</i>, a study of white resistance to desegregation in Atlanta, Kruse produces a panoramic and engaging portrayal of the struggle over desegregation in the self-styled “city too busy to hate.”</p>
<p>Each of these three books revolves around the same question: What broke the Democrats' hold on a South once so solid that Roosevelt never lost a southern state in four presidential campaigns, and Republicans, still bearing the cross of the Civil War, failed to elect a single U.S. senator from the region from 1903 through 1961? </p>
<p>Almost all versions of the disaffected South story focus on race. In this telling, the critical event sundering the South from the Democratic Party is the white backlash against the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts under Johnson in the 1960s (anticipated, to some extent, by the 1948 Dixiecrat revolt against Harry Truman's first tentative steps toward civil rights). As Leuchtenburg recounts, Johnson famously lamented upon signing the Civil Rights Act that he had just “delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.”</p>
<p>With revisionist zeal, Shafer and Johnston want to recast this picture. They don't deny that white resistance to civil rights influenced the South's realignment, but they argue that race was less important than class in fueling the GOP's advance. The growth after World War II of a southern white middle-class open to Republican small-government arguments, they insist, drove the GOP's gains across the region. “The engine of partisan change in the postwar South was, first and foremost, economic development and an associated politics of social class,” they write. </p>
<p>Their principal evidence for this conclusion consists of polling results from the University of Michigan's American National Election Studies that found Republicans are advancing faster in the South among affluent than lower-income whites. The authors also show that from the 1960s on, Republicans ran more strongly than Democrats among Southerners who viewed government more as problem than solution.</p>
<p>Shafer and Johnston are rigorous and dogged in their use of polling results and imaginative in their attempts to find data that can empirically test conventional assumptions; for those who can stomach the gristle of regression analyses, there's much to chew on in this book. But the authors protest too much. By telling their story solely through polling results, they ignore the flesh-and-blood reality of decades of Republican presidential and state-level campaigns that signaled sympathy for white Southerners resisting the civil-rights revolution. No one watching Barry Goldwater in 1964 or Ronald Reagan in 1980 could conclude that those candidates believed tax cuts alone would break the Democratic hold on the South.</p>
<p>Even the data cited by Shafer and Johnston show that from the 1960s through the 1990s, in races for national office, Republicans ran best among the Southerners most resistant to government action to promote racial equity. And the authors ignore the extent to which, during the critical period, whites may have been more receptive to small-government arguments because they believed that public programs disproportionately benefited minorities -- the dynamic that pollster Stanley B. Greenberg mapped in his path-breaking study of Macomb County, Michigan, during the early 1980s. Shafer and Johnston are right to see more than race alone in the South's political transformation. But at their most dogmatic, the two seem to be arguing that the rise of air conditioning (because it sped the South's economic development) played a larger role in realigning the region than the decline of segregation.</p>
<p>Kruse's surprisingly engaging book is a useful corrective, though it pushes to the other extreme in its conclusions. In other hands this might have been a myopic case study. But Kruse brings vividly to life the Atlanta of the 1950s and 1960s, taking readers from the mayor's office, to black churches and elite corporate boardrooms, to the block-by-block, sometimes house-to-house, battle over racial transition in blue-collar neighborhoods, as the city grappled with integration in housing, schools, public transportation, hotels, and restaurants.</p>
<p>Kruse inverts the economics-first conclusion of Shafer and Johnson: He sees the small-government arguments of modern conservatism almost entirely as an expression of white antipathy to equal rights. Whites, especially in the South, have retreated from support for activist government precisely to the extent they believe it can benefit blacks, he argues. At “the start of the twenty-first century,” Kruse writes, “the politics created by white flight are not simply still present; they are predominant.”</p>
<p>It's true that the South's states-rights ideology took root to defend first slavery and then segregation from federal interference. During the Depression era, conservative Southerners resisted some of Roosevelt's key economic initiatives and fought unions partly because they worried they might empower African Americans to confront white supremacy more forcefully. And through the modern era, racial resentments have sometimes contributed to the success of anti-tax and anti-spending arguments, as Greenberg found in Macomb County.</p>
<p>But like Shafer and Johnston, Kruse pushes a valid argument too far. Race alone has never entirely explained the hostility to government activism from Southern conservatives, as Leuchtenburg shows in his compelling account of Roosevelt's strained relationship with the region. To mollify the South, Roosevelt mostly shunned the growing demands by blacks for greater racial equality. And, as will be discussed more below, he even permitted southerners to structure many of his economic programs in ways that perpetuated racial inequality.</p>
<p>But while Roosevelt's deference on race brought him support from southern Democrats early in his presidency for key initiatives such as Social Security, tension steadily grew over his vision of an activist government working to boost living standards through public investment and support for unionization. Over time, many southern Democrats increasingly regarded that agenda as a threat to the low-wage, low-tax, low–public-service traditions that benefited the region's economic elites and imposed as great a cost on low-income whites as blacks. </p>
<p>As far back as 1938, Roosevelt delivered a combative speech in Gainesville, Georgia, condemning the South's history of minimal public services and low-wage employment. Roosevelt's words thrilled southern liberals who saw an energetic government as the key both to economically developing the region and building an enduring majority in local politics around class, not racial, interests. But many in the conservative mainstream of southern Democratic leadership denounced Roosevelt's agenda as a threat to free enterprise and personal liberty. That conflict anticipated later developments. On the one hand, the vision that FDR offered would later inspire successful post-integration southern Democrats like Bill Clinton and Jim Hunt. And, on the other, the anti-Roosevelt Democrats made the same arguments that would help elect Republicans across the South generations later. By 1944, Leuchtenburg writes, Roosevelt faced such widespread resistance to his fourth nomination from southern Democrats that Texas Democratic Sen. “Pappy” Lee O'Daniel “called the president a greater menace than Hitler.”</p>
<p>That account of Roosevelt's struggles with the South (despite his racial deference) highlights one of most consistent strengths across these three books: Each shows, in a different way, the breadth of the disagreements that divided the region from the Democrats. Reading through these works, the wonder isn't that Democrats have lost their preeminence in the South, but rather that it took so long. Leuchtenburg's verdict on the cause of the divorce seems the most balanced: Race played the dominant role in the critical period, but differences over taxes, spending, and the overall reach of government -- sometimes intersecting with race, at other points operating independently -- exacerbated the tension. </p>
<p>In the years since the civil-rights era, race has receded as a direct factor in southern campaigns. And while Republican anti-tax arguments still strike a powerful chord, centrist Democrats (especially in governors' races) have made progress at rebuilding a constituency for an activist government that promotes economic development and improves the public schools. Neither race nor the role of government is the largest hurdle now facing southern Democrats. Rather their principal problem is the GOP's overwhelming strength with religiously devout voters (especially white evangelical Protestants) who believe Democrats don't represent their views on social issues and national security.</p>
<p>That trend is beyond the historical period these three books examine. As a result, none sheds much light on the contemporary political competition in the South (though Kruse probably comes closest). Yet, in the fourth and most provocative work considered here, Ira Katznelson passionately argues that the history of the South's long struggle with race still raises questions urgent for the nation to address today.</p>
<p></p><center> * * * </center>
<p>Katznelson's short but powerful <i>When Affirmative Action Was White</i> finds a fresh vein in this well-mined terrain: the cost to African Americans of the policies that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations adopted to conciliate southern Democrats.</p>
<p>According to Katznelson, Roosevelt's deference to the South in shaping the New Deal -- compounded by similar decisions under Truman -- represented a critical “branching moment” separating the economic fortunes of whites and blacks. Katznelson acknowledges that programs from Social Security to the GI Bill greatly benefited blacks who participated in them. But he charges that Roosevelt and Truman, to win votes for their domestic agenda, allowed southern legislators to structure the key economic programs in ways that denied blacks their fair share of benefits. By uplifting whites while largely excluding blacks, he concludes, the federal government under Roosevelt and Truman practiced a form of affirmative action for whites and permanently widened the socioeconomic gap between the races.</p>
<p>The initial Social Security legislation, for instance, excluded agricultural and domestic workers -- a decision that denied benefits to 65 percent of blacks nationwide and as much as 80 percent in some southern states. (That decision, not reversed until nearly two decades later, tilted the legislation so baldly against African Americans that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People testified against it.) </p>
<p>In other cases, Katznelson writes, southern Democrats won decentralized control of New Deal training and relief programs that allowed local officials to blatantly discriminate against blacks. While whites benefited from military training in economically valuable skills during World War II, racial segregation in the armed forces denied comparable opportunities to African Americans. </p>
<p>The postwar GI Bill compounded the inequity. Because a much smaller percentage of blacks than whites were admitted to the military during World War II, fewer qualified for the wide-ranging benefits from the legislation (which Katznelson says flatly, “created middle-class America”). And even many black veterans were denied benefits because they could use them only at overcrowded black colleges and training institutions that lacked enough space to meet the demand. In all, more than twice as large a share of white veterans as black attended college through the GI Bill.</p>
<p>Katznelson presents this argument with the barely contained ferocity of a prosecutor. He finds stronger evidence of southern fingerprints on some policies (labor law) than on others (Social Security). At times this impassioned and cogent book is almost too taut: Katznelson might have slowed down long enough to present more supporting evidence for his individual allegations. And like all prosecutors, he slights exculpatory evidence. In <i>A New Deal for Blacks</i>, the most comprehensive survey of Roosevelt's impact on African Americans, Harvard Sitkoff notes that despite “the continuity of discrimination and segregation,” the federal government under Roosevelt “aided blacks to an unprecedented extent both substantively and symbolically.”</p>
<p>But the evidence Katznelson marshals, on most fronts, is original and convincing. And his conclusion is challenging: This history, he argues, should justify “even more extensive affirmative action” programs than exist today. Given the intertwined attitudes about race and government that Kruse explores, even sympathetic readers may question the political wisdom of proposing new government benefits overtly targeted to minorities (Katznelson, at one point, praises race-neutral initiatives to uplift the poor). But any politician who wants to make a case for reviving race-specific aid to blacks isn't likely to find a stronger brief than the one Katznelson presents here.</p>
<p></p><center> * * * </center>
<p>The most gripping sections in Leuchtenburg explore the personal conflicts within Truman and Johnson as they confronted segregation. Raised on the border of the old South (Johnson in the Texas Hill Country, Truman in Missouri), both the descendents of slaveholders, each man shared much of the segregationists' racial prejudices. Yet each fundamentally believed that America's ideals demanded equal rights for blacks. And each believed the South would never fully rejoin American life so long as it wore the shackles of segregation.</p>
<p>In many ways the 40 years since the passage of the landmark civil-rights laws have fulfilled their vision. Since the fall of segregation, the South has become more affluent and more diverse both socially (with steady in-migration from other regions) and economically (with enormous investment from domestic and international companies). It looks more like America than it did a generation ago, and its political leaders no longer carry an insurmountable stigma beyond its borders. For the full century from the Civil War until the passage of the Civil Rights Act, no southerner won the presidency (except, arguably, Virginia-born Woodrow Wilson, who made his name as president of Princeton and governor of New Jersey). Since segregation fell, southerners have won six of the 11 presidential elections (even excluding transplanted Yankee George H.W. Bush).</p>
<p>Yet in other respects the South remains a place apart, especially in American politics. Religion infuses political life there more pervasively than anywhere else; anti-government, anti-tax messages resonate more powerfully than in almost any other part of the country, and so do hawkish positions on national security. </p>
<p>The singular qualities of the South present Republicans with a challenge Roosevelt, Truman, and Johnson would recognize. It's no coincidence that Republicans have lost ground among socially liberal voters along the coasts and in the population centers of the upper Midwest as their agenda and message have tilted more toward the uncompromising priorities of southern conservatives. Overwhelming southern support provides Republicans a formidable floor in the competition between the parties, but it may also impose on them a ceiling. Indeed, the South's political transformation has left both parties in a precarious position. Democrats are unlikely to regain the upper hand in American politics unless they solve at least some of the South's interlocking riddles of race, class, and culture. But integrating the South into a stable majority coalition may prove as difficult for Republicans in the new century as it was for Democrats in the last. </p>
<p><i>Ronald Brownstein is a national political correspondent and columnist for the </i>Los Angeles Times.</p>
</div></div></div>Tue, 24 Jan 2006 00:50:44 +0000145180 at https://prospect.orgRonald BrownsteinHow the South Rose Againhttps://prospect.org/article/how-south-rose-again
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><blockquote><p><b>When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America</b> by Ira Katznelson (<i>W.W. Norton, 238 pages, $25.95</i>)</p></blockquote>
<blockquote><p><b>The White House Looks South</b> by William E. Leuchtenburg (<i>Louisiana State University Press, 668 pages, $45.00</i>)</p></blockquote>
<blockquote><p><b>White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism</b> by (<i>Kevin M. Kruse Princeton University Press, 325 pages, $35.00</i>)</p></blockquote>
<blockquote><p><b>The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South</b> by Byron E. Shafer and Richard Johnston (<i>Harvard University Press, 240 pages, $39.95</i>)</p></blockquote>
<p>
Nothing has contributed more to the conservative ascendancy in American politics than the realignment of the South from solidly Democratic to reliably Republican. The South now furnishes the decisive votes for Republican control of the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the White House. Outside the South, Democrats still hold the advantage in the competition on all three fronts. But the Republican dominance of the South has grown so pronounced that it swamps the Democratic strengths elsewhere and provides the GOP with its margin of majority for both Congress and the White House.</p>
<p>Consider the Senate. In the 11 states of the old Confederacy plus Oklahoma and Kentucky -- the generally accepted political definition of the South -- Republicans hold 22 of the 26 Senate seats. In the rest of the country, Democrats control seven more Senate seats than the GOP. But that's not nearly enough to offset the lopsided Republican advantage in the South.</p>
<p>The same is true in the House. Outside the South, Democrats hold a 152-140 edge in House seats. But the GOP's 40-seat cushion in the South ensures that Illinois Republican Denny Hastert holds the speaker's gavel, not San Francisco Democrat Nancy Pelosi.<br />
The imbalance is even more pronounced in the race for the White House. In 2000, Al Gore won just over 70 percent of the Electoral College votes at stake outside the South. But George W. Bush narrowly won the White House because he swept all 165 Electoral College votes in the 13 southern states. Four years later, John Kerry won 68 percent of the Electoral College votes outside the South. But Bush won because he again swept the 13 Southern states -- this time worth 168 Electoral College votes after population growth measured in the 2000 Census.</p>
<p>Democrats might someday cobble together a congressional or presidential majority with such limited southern support; Republicans, after all, frequently did precisely that from the 1880s to the 1920s. But it is never easy to overcome such a preponderant advantage in one region, as Republicans learned when the “solid-South” underpinned Democratic dominance in Washington for nearly four decades after the New Deal. One of the clearest lessons of the past decade is that Democrats will always face an uphill climb to power if they can't perform at least somewhat better in the South.</p>
<p></p><center> * * * </center>
<p>Like all other aspects of southern life, southern politics beguiles writers. The South has probably inspired more classic works of political science and political history (think V.O. Key Jr. or C. Vann Woodward) than any other region, not to mention the greatest novel ever written about American politics, Robert Penn Warren's <i>All The King's Men</i>. The fascination with the South is, in one sense, odd because for almost a full century after the Civil War, little ostensibly changed in a southern political system built around the twin exclusion of African Americans and Republicans. But novelists and historians alike have found irresistible material in the sweat and bombast, the intransigence and fear that characterized southern politics under segregation, and the electoral earthquakes that have reshaped the region since.</p>
<p>Three new books join this lengthy shelf. Each approaches the story from a distinctive angle. <i>The White House Looks South</i> by the respected historian (and adopted Southerner) William E. Leuchtenburg, is a conversational and discursive exploration of how Democratic Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Lyndon Johnson managed, mollified, submitted to, and confronted the South. This is more a meditation on these presidents than a systematic analysis of them. Leuchtenburg quotes other writers too much and presents too few specifics, yet his command of this history is so strong, and the story itself so powerful, that this often-meandering book courses at times with propulsive power. </p>
<p><i>The End of Southern Exceptionalism</i> by Byron E. Shafer and Richard Johnston examines this history literally by the numbers. It is a work of hard-core quantitative political science that advances several provocative arguments but will probably put off anyone who isn't eager to decipher discussions about a “multinomial logistic regression converted to a probability distribution.”</p>
<p>In contrast, historian Kevin M. Kruse illuminates the story at ground level. <i>In White Flight</i>, a study of white resistance to desegregation in Atlanta, Kruse produces a panoramic and engaging portrayal of the struggle over desegregation in the self-styled “city too busy to hate.”</p>
<p>Each of these three books revolves around the same question: What broke the Democrats' hold on a South once so solid that Roosevelt never lost a southern state in four presidential campaigns, and Republicans, still bearing the cross of the Civil War, failed to elect a single U.S. senator from the region from 1903 through 1961? </p>
<p>Almost all versions of the disaffected South story focus on race. In this telling, the critical event sundering the South from the Democratic Party is the white backlash against the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts under Johnson in the 1960s (anticipated, to some extent, by the 1948 Dixiecrat revolt against Harry Truman's first tentative steps toward civil rights). As Leuchtenburg recounts, Johnson famously lamented upon signing the Civil Rights Act that he had just “delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.”</p>
<p>With revisionist zeal, Shafer and Johnston want to recast this picture. They don't deny that white resistance to civil rights influenced the South's realignment, but they argue that race was less important than class in fueling the GOP's advance. The growth after World War II of a southern white middle-class open to Republican small-government arguments, they insist, drove the GOP's gains across the region. “The engine of partisan change in the postwar South was, first and foremost, economic development and an associated politics of social class,” they write. </p>
<p>Their principal evidence for this conclusion consists of polling results from the University of Michigan's American National Election Studies that found Republicans are advancing faster in the South among affluent than lower-income whites. The authors also show that from the 1960s on, Republicans ran more strongly than Democrats among Southerners who viewed government more as problem than solution.</p>
<p>Shafer and Johnston are rigorous and dogged in their use of polling results and imaginative in their attempts to find data that can empirically test conventional assumptions; for those who can stomach the gristle of regression analyses, there's much to chew on in this book. But the authors protest too much. By telling their story solely through polling results, they ignore the flesh-and-blood reality of decades of Republican presidential and state-level campaigns that signaled sympathy for white Southerners resisting the civil-rights revolution. No one watching Barry Goldwater in 1964 or Ronald Reagan in 1980 could conclude that those candidates believed tax cuts alone would break the Democratic hold on the South.</p>
<p>Even the data cited by Shafer and Johnston show that from the 1960s through the 1990s, in races for national office, Republicans ran best among the Southerners most resistant to government action to promote racial equity. And the authors ignore the extent to which, during the critical period, whites may have been more receptive to small-government arguments because they believed that public programs disproportionately benefited minorities -- the dynamic that pollster Stanley B. Greenberg mapped in his path-breaking study of Macomb County, Michigan, during the early 1980s. Shafer and Johnston are right to see more than race alone in the South's political transformation. But at their most dogmatic, the two seem to be arguing that the rise of air conditioning (because it sped the South's economic development) played a larger role in realigning the region than the decline of segregation.</p>
<p>Kruse's surprisingly engaging book is a useful corrective, though it pushes to the other extreme in its conclusions. In other hands this might have been a myopic case study. But Kruse brings vividly to life the Atlanta of the 1950s and 1960s, taking readers from the mayor's office, to black churches and elite corporate boardrooms, to the block-by-block, sometimes house-to-house, battle over racial transition in blue-collar neighborhoods, as the city grappled with integration in housing, schools, public transportation, hotels, and restaurants.</p>
<p>Kruse inverts the economics-first conclusion of Shafer and Johnson: He sees the small-government arguments of modern conservatism almost entirely as an expression of white antipathy to equal rights. Whites, especially in the South, have retreated from support for activist government precisely to the extent they believe it can benefit blacks, he argues. At “the start of the twenty-first century,” Kruse writes, “the politics created by white flight are not simply still present; they are predominant.”</p>
<p>It's true that the South's states-rights ideology took root to defend first slavery and then segregation from federal interference. During the Depression era, conservative Southerners resisted some of Roosevelt's key economic initiatives and fought unions partly because they worried they might empower African Americans to confront white supremacy more forcefully. And through the modern era, racial resentments have sometimes contributed to the success of anti-tax and anti-spending arguments, as Greenberg found in Macomb County.</p>
<p>But like Shafer and Johnston, Kruse pushes a valid argument too far. Race alone has never entirely explained the hostility to government activism from Southern conservatives, as Leuchtenburg shows in his compelling account of Roosevelt's strained relationship with the region. To mollify the South, Roosevelt mostly shunned the growing demands by blacks for greater racial equality. And, as will be discussed more below, he even permitted southerners to structure many of his economic programs in ways that perpetuated racial inequality.</p>
<p>But while Roosevelt's deference on race brought him support from southern Democrats early in his presidency for key initiatives such as Social Security, tension steadily grew over his vision of an activist government working to boost living standards through public investment and support for unionization. Over time, many southern Democrats increasingly regarded that agenda as a threat to the low-wage, low-tax, low–public-service traditions that benefited the region's economic elites and imposed as great a cost on low-income whites as blacks. </p>
<p>As far back as 1938, Roosevelt delivered a combative speech in Gainesville, Georgia, condemning the South's history of minimal public services and low-wage employment. Roosevelt's words thrilled southern liberals who saw an energetic government as the key both to economically developing the region and building an enduring majority in local politics around class, not racial, interests. But many in the conservative mainstream of southern Democratic leadership denounced Roosevelt's agenda as a threat to free enterprise and personal liberty. That conflict anticipated later developments. On the one hand, the vision that FDR offered would later inspire successful post-integration southern Democrats like Bill Clinton and Jim Hunt. And, on the other, the anti-Roosevelt Democrats made the same arguments that would help elect Republicans across the South generations later. By 1944, Leuchtenburg writes, Roosevelt faced such widespread resistance to his fourth nomination from southern Democrats that Texas Democratic Sen. “Pappy” Lee O'Daniel “called the president a greater menace than Hitler.”</p>
<p>That account of Roosevelt's struggles with the South (despite his racial deference) highlights one of most consistent strengths across these three books: Each shows, in a different way, the breadth of the disagreements that divided the region from the Democrats. Reading through these works, the wonder isn't that Democrats have lost their preeminence in the South, but rather that it took so long. Leuchtenburg's verdict on the cause of the divorce seems the most balanced: Race played the dominant role in the critical period, but differences over taxes, spending, and the overall reach of government -- sometimes intersecting with race, at other points operating independently -- exacerbated the tension. </p>
<p>In the years since the civil-rights era, race has receded as a direct factor in southern campaigns. And while Republican anti-tax arguments still strike a powerful chord, centrist Democrats (especially in governors' races) have made progress at rebuilding a constituency for an activist government that promotes economic development and improves the public schools. Neither race nor the role of government is the largest hurdle now facing southern Democrats. Rather their principal problem is the GOP's overwhelming strength with religiously devout voters (especially white evangelical Protestants) who believe Democrats don't represent their views on social issues and national security.</p>
<p>That trend is beyond the historical period these three books examine. As a result, none sheds much light on the contemporary political competition in the South (though Kruse probably comes closest). Yet, in the fourth and most provocative work considered here, Ira Katznelson passionately argues that the history of the South's long struggle with race still raises questions urgent for the nation to address today.</p>
<p></p><center> * * * </center>
<p>Katznelson's short but powerful <i>When Affirmative Action Was White</i> finds a fresh vein in this well-mined terrain: the cost to African Americans of the policies that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations adopted to conciliate southern Democrats.</p>
<p>According to Katznelson, Roosevelt's deference to the South in shaping the New Deal -- compounded by similar decisions under Truman -- represented a critical “branching moment” separating the economic fortunes of whites and blacks. Katznelson acknowledges that programs from Social Security to the GI Bill greatly benefited blacks who participated in them. But he charges that Roosevelt and Truman, to win votes for their domestic agenda, allowed southern legislators to structure the key economic programs in ways that denied blacks their fair share of benefits. By uplifting whites while largely excluding blacks, he concludes, the federal government under Roosevelt and Truman practiced a form of affirmative action for whites and permanently widened the socioeconomic gap between the races.</p>
<p>The initial Social Security legislation, for instance, excluded agricultural and domestic workers -- a decision that denied benefits to 65 percent of blacks nationwide and as much as 80 percent in some southern states. (That decision, not reversed until nearly two decades later, tilted the legislation so baldly against African Americans that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People testified against it.) </p>
<p>In other cases, Katznelson writes, southern Democrats won decentralized control of New Deal training and relief programs that allowed local officials to blatantly discriminate against blacks. While whites benefited from military training in economically valuable skills during World War II, racial segregation in the armed forces denied comparable opportunities to African Americans. </p>
<p>The postwar GI Bill compounded the inequity. Because a much smaller percentage of blacks than whites were admitted to the military during World War II, fewer qualified for the wide-ranging benefits from the legislation (which Katznelson says flatly, “created middle-class America”). And even many black veterans were denied benefits because they could use them only at overcrowded black colleges and training institutions that lacked enough space to meet the demand. In all, more than twice as large a share of white veterans as black attended college through the GI Bill.</p>
<p>Katznelson presents this argument with the barely contained ferocity of a prosecutor. He finds stronger evidence of southern fingerprints on some policies (labor law) than on others (Social Security). At times this impassioned and cogent book is almost too taut: Katznelson might have slowed down long enough to present more supporting evidence for his individual allegations. And like all prosecutors, he slights exculpatory evidence. In <i>A New Deal for Blacks</i>, the most comprehensive survey of Roosevelt's impact on African Americans, Harvard Sitkoff notes that despite “the continuity of discrimination and segregation,” the federal government under Roosevelt “aided blacks to an unprecedented extent both substantively and symbolically.”</p>
<p>But the evidence Katznelson marshals, on most fronts, is original and convincing. And his conclusion is challenging: This history, he argues, should justify “even more extensive affirmative action” programs than exist today. Given the intertwined attitudes about race and government that Kruse explores, even sympathetic readers may question the political wisdom of proposing new government benefits overtly targeted to minorities (Katznelson, at one point, praises race-neutral initiatives to uplift the poor). But any politician who wants to make a case for reviving race-specific aid to blacks isn't likely to find a stronger brief than the one Katznelson presents here.</p>
<p></p><center> * * * </center>
<p>The most gripping sections in Leuchtenburg explore the personal conflicts within Truman and Johnson as they confronted segregation. Raised on the border of the old South (Johnson in the Texas Hill Country, Truman in Missouri), both the descendents of slaveholders, each man shared much of the segregationists' racial prejudices. Yet each fundamentally believed that America's ideals demanded equal rights for blacks. And each believed the South would never fully rejoin American life so long as it wore the shackles of segregation.</p>
<p>In many ways the 40 years since the passage of the landmark civil-rights laws have fulfilled their vision. Since the fall of segregation, the South has become more affluent and more diverse both socially (with steady in-migration from other regions) and economically (with enormous investment from domestic and international companies). It looks more like America than it did a generation ago, and its political leaders no longer carry an insurmountable stigma beyond its borders. For the full century from the Civil War until the passage of the Civil Rights Act, no southerner won the presidency (except, arguably, Virginia-born Woodrow Wilson, who made his name as president of Princeton and governor of New Jersey). Since segregation fell, southerners have won six of the 11 presidential elections (even excluding transplanted Yankee George H.W. Bush).</p>
<p>Yet in other respects the South remains a place apart, especially in American politics. Religion infuses political life there more pervasively than anywhere else; anti-government, anti-tax messages resonate more powerfully than in almost any other part of the country, and so do hawkish positions on national security. </p>
<p>The singular qualities of the South present Republicans with a challenge Roosevelt, Truman, and Johnson would recognize. It's no coincidence that Republicans have lost ground among socially liberal voters along the coasts and in the population centers of the upper Midwest as their agenda and message have tilted more toward the uncompromising priorities of southern conservatives. Overwhelming southern support provides Republicans a formidable floor in the competition between the parties, but it may also impose on them a ceiling. Indeed, the South's political transformation has left both parties in a precarious position. Democrats are unlikely to regain the upper hand in American politics unless they solve at least some of the South's interlocking riddles of race, class, and culture. But integrating the South into a stable majority coalition may prove as difficult for Republicans in the new century as it was for Democrats in the last. </p>
<p><i>Ronald Brownstein is a national political correspondent and columnist for the </i>Los Angeles Times.</p>
</div></div></div>Tue, 17 Jan 2006 05:36:26 +0000145167 at https://prospect.orgRonald Brownstein Vexations of the Heartlandhttps://prospect.org/article/vexations-heartland
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><blockquote><p><b>What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart<br />
of America</b><br /> By Thomas Frank • Metropolitan Books • 320 PAGES• $24.00</p>
<p><b>Homegrown Democrat: A Few Plain Thoughts From the Heart of<br />
America</b><br /> By Garrison Keillor • Viking • 237 PAGES • $19.95
</p></blockquote>
<p>Few developments have changed American politics more in the past generation than the Republican breakthrough into blue-collar America. White working-class voters were a pillar of the New Deal coalition that allowed Democrats to dominate national politics for the generation after Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But those voters began turning away from Democrats amid the cultural tumult of the 1960s, and the party has never entirely regained their allegiance. From the “silent majority” of Richard Nixon's era to the “Reagan Democrats” who flocked to Ronald Reagan, the angry white men of the 1990s, and the churchgoing legions who backed George W. Bush in 2000, voters of modest means have become central to the Republican political strategy. </p>
<p>This fundamental shift remains a source of endless frustration and puzzlement for liberals. While working-class voters migrated toward the GOP over the past 35 years, Republicans have regularly pursued economic policies, particularly in slashing the top income-tax rates, that offer far greater benefits to the most affluent than to their new constituents. Recently, the Congressional Budget Office concluded that 32 percent of the benefits of Bush's tax cuts fell to just the top 1 percent of earners.</p>
<p>Such numbers leave author Thomas Frank somewhere between stupefied and exasperated in his crisp, impassioned, and often elegant book. He presents the affinity for the GOP among working-class voters as a “derangement” that makes no more sense than if the cattle somehow conspired to help sharpen the knives at the slaughterhouse. “People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about,” Frank writes on his very first page. “This species of derangement is the bedrock of our civic order; it is the foundation on which all else rests.”</p>
<p>Frank takes his title from an 1896 essay in which Kansas journalist William Allen White, editor of <i>The Emporia Gazette</i>, eviscerated the left-wing populist followers of William Jennings Bryan. Frank, also a native Kansan, similarly wants to explain and puncture the conservative populism that has powered the GOP advance into working-class America since the 1960s.</p>
<p>Frank is a talented stylist and engaging storyteller, and his stew of memoir, journalism, and essay produces many fresh insights. But ultimately his explanation for the success of populism on the right is too narrow, and his analysis of the Democratic response, especially under Bill Clinton in the 1990s, too simplistic. The paradoxical result is a book that, for all its virtues, is too sanguine about the electoral challenge Democrats face and too pessimistic about their ability to overcome it.</p>
<p>Frank tells his story largely through the experience of Kansas, where a moderate Republican establishment that gave the nation Dwight Eisenhower, Bob Dole, and Nancy Kassebaum has been overwhelmed by the rise of blue-collar conservative activists driven almost entirely by such social issues as opposition to abortion. As Frank explores his own conversion from right to left, recounts the dizzying internecine warfare between moderates and conservatives in the Kansas GOP, and visits an assortment of true believers, the results are entertaining and earnest. Frank sometimes lets his disdain for the right cloud his understanding; he seems incapable, for example, of imagining that social issues might trump material concerns for some middle-income voters. But he is often funny and rarely condescending.</p>
<p>Yet because Kansas has been reliably Republican roughly forever, Frank's story is mostly useful in explaining the generational change in the GOP that has marginalized moderates and elevated conservatives -- a change neatly encapsulated by the distance between George Bush Senior's in-box presidency and his son's crusading conservatism.</p>
<p>Frank has larger aims. Expanding from the Kansas experience, he presents the GOP renaissance since the 1960s as the fruit of a simple but brilliantly executed sleight of hand: an agenda that distracts the masses with cultural grievances while showering economic benefits on the very elite the masses are directed to despise. “Cultural anger is marshaled to achieve economic ends,” he writes, summarizing his 320 pages with admirable concision.</p>
<p>The great success of conservative populism, he concludes, has been to change the way millions of average Americans think about liberalism. In Roosevelt's era, Americans saw liberalism mostly as a means of protecting the economic interests of average families. Now, Frank argues, conservatives have effectively redefined liberalism as an agenda with principal goals that are cultural rather than economic. “Whatever the target,” he writes, “the conservative social critique always boils down to the same simple message, liberalism … is an affectation of the loathsome rich, as bizarre as their taste for Corgi dogs and extra-virgin olive oil.” I'm not sure what a Corgi dog is, but I'm guessing you wouldn't find many of them yelping out the window of a pickup truck.</p>
<p>Socially conservative and religiously devout voters have indeed become the bedrock of the GOP coalition: In 2000, white voters who attended church more than once a week voted for Bush over Al Gore by about 4 to 1. But Frank errs by emphasizing cultural issues to the virtual exclusion of all others in explaining the Democrats' retreat among the white working class. That narrow focus may be understandable given his book's grounding in Kansas, where social issues -- from abortion to the teaching of evolution -- have generated most of the past decade's political turmoil. Yet by slighting other factors that have fueled the GOP's breakthroughs, he minimizes the breadth of the challenge Democrats face with working families.</p>
<p>Frank touches on the role of racially tinged issues, from crime to welfare, in dissolving the Democrats' ties to working-class voters. Those issues provided a strong tailwind for the gop in working- and middle-class white communities from the late 1960s through the early 1990s, but Frank is right that liberals are too quick to blame their setbacks solely on coded appeals to racism. And however powerful those issues were earlier, they lost much of their sting as Clinton's policies both contributed to a decline in crime and welfare dependency and left the Democrats holding much more centrist ground on both fronts.</p>
<p>But Frank says almost nothing about the role of anti-government populism and issues of national security and strength in the realignment of working-class America. Yet both rival cultural issues as assets for the GOP. Republicans have won blue-collar support for tax cuts not only by diverting attention to cultural issues but also because millions of Americans have concluded that government either wastes their taxes or lavishes their hard-earned money on the undeserving poor. Frank's silence on the GOP's effective use of security issues over the past generation is even odder, especially in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks. From Richard Nixon through George W. Bush, Republicans have benefited from a reputation for defending the nation more forcefully.</p>
<p>And though the war in Iraq has strained confidence in Bush's management of national security, polls show his determination to emphasize military force in combating terrorism generally finds more support on the assembly line than in the office parks. In a survey last year, researchers at the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press asked Americans whether they agreed with the statement, “The best way to ensure peace is through military strength.” Lower-income voters and those with only high-school educations were much more likely to agree than the affluent and those with college degrees.</p>
<p>The wrong diagnosis of the Democratic dilemma leads Frank to the wrong solution. He wants Democrats to abandon their efforts to court upper-income voters who share the party's views on social issues and instead to amplify the volume on economic populism. The Democrats' recent experience challenges that prescription on both counts. In 2000, Gore thumped the populist tub as loudly as any liberal critic could demand. Yet his promise to represent “the people” against “the powerful” wasn't enough to stop Bush from winning most white working-class votes. Conversely, Clinton's two victories demonstrated that it was possible for Democrats to expand their electoral appeal up the income ladder while delivering tangible benefits for lower- and middle-income families.</p>
<p>Like many on the left, Frank casually assumes that Clinton (and the Democratic Leadership Council that hatched many of his ideas) abandoned the party's historic commitment to the less fortunate. Yet under Clinton, core Democratic constituencies gained more ground than at any time since the boom years of the 1960s. During Clinton's two terms, the number of Americans in poverty fell by 8.1 million, compared with just 77,000 during the eight years of Reagan. From 1993 through 2000, the median income grew faster for African Americans and Hispanics than it did for whites (who enjoyed a healthy increase of their own). Income for families on every rung of the economic ladder grew faster under Clinton than it did under Reagan, the Congressional Budget Office recently calculated; for those smack in the center of the income distribution, the growth was nearly twice as fast. </p>
<p>The very rich did very well under Clinton, with incomes also rising faster than under Reagan. But while the average federal income-tax burden on the top fifth of families fell sharply under Reagan, income taxes rose as a share of income for the top 20 percent during Clinton's two terms. That helped generate the funds Clinton used to provide health care for children of the working poor, increase the federal investment in education, and expand the Earned Income Tax Credit.</p>
<p>The kicker is that while Clinton delivered these tangible benefits to his party's traditional constituencies and demanded more from the affluent in taxes, he greatly expanded the party's electoral appeal among the comfortable voters Frank believes are fool's gold for Democrats. In the three presidential elections of the 1980s, Democrats lost voters earning $50,000 a year or more by at least 25 percentage points; Clinton cut that deficit to 5 points or less in both his elections -- even while simultaneously improving the party's performance among voters earning between $15,000 and $30,000.</p>
<p>Clinton succeeded at both ends because he advanced an activist agenda that provided benefits to average families while confronting <i>all</i> of the arguments conservatives use against Democrats. He moved the party away from its post-Vietnam reluctance to use force, defanged anti-government populism by embracing a balanced budget, and showed respect for traditionalist values in his policies (particularly measures such as welfare reform that linked responsibility with opportunity) if not his personal behavior. Largely because of that personal behavior, Clinton didn't leave behind the stable majority he hoped to; but he proved, contrary to Frank, that Democrats don't have to choose between Wal-Mart and Starbucks.</p>
<p>Frank is an essayist, not a political strategist, so it would be wrong to hold these lapses too much against him. His book is a smart and trenchant contribution to the liberal argument, and a fun read as well. </p>
<p>Much the same can be said about <i>Homegrown Democrat</i> from Garrison Keillor, another literary midwestern populist. It's a memoir and a meditation, not a manifesto. Like Frank, Keillor sometimes strays into hyperbole (does Keillor really believe the GOP's leadership is “borderline psychopath”?). But Keillor is frequently beguiling and sometimes moving as he explains his unshakeable belief that the fundamental divide in politics is between those who believe we are obligated to care for our neighbor and those who don't. To Keillor, liberalism is nothing more than the organized expression of the impulse that causes strangers to volunteer when a neighbor is threatened by flood. “Liberalism is the politics of kindness,” he insists.</p>
<p>Keillor, like Frank, seems mystified that anyone who folds his own laundry would vote Republican. But the days of a political alignment defined solely, or even predominantly, by class are gone. Many Americans, on both sides of the income divide, don't consider it a “derangement” to express their cultural values at least as much as their economic interests in their vote. Overall, Frank and Keillor have written books of grace, empathy, and insight. But in assuming that Democrats can only win by resurrecting the politics of Franklin Roosevelt and Hubert Humphrey, they are steering through the rearview mirror. </p>
<p>Ronald Brownstein is a national political correspondent and columnist for the Los Angeles Times.</p>
</div></div></div>Sun, 19 Sep 2004 21:09:26 +0000143883 at https://prospect.orgRonald BrownsteinThe Life of the Partieshttps://prospect.org/article/life-parties
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><blockquote><p>
<b>Party of the People: A History of the Democrats</b><br /><br />
By Jules Witcover, Random House, 758 pages, $35.00</p>
<p>
<b>Grand Old Party: A History of the Republicans</b><br /><br />
By Lewis L. Gould, Random House, 588 pages, $35.00
</p></blockquote>
<p>Few institutions of any sort in American life have remained relevant for as long as the two national political parties. The Democratic Party traces its roots back to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the 1790s. The Republican Party will celebrate its 150th anniversary next year. Not many other products on the shelf in 1854, much less the 1790s, are still attracting customers today.</p>
<p>
Even more remarkable than the sheer longevity of the two parties is their dominance. No other major party has emerged since the Republicans replaced the Whigs as the principal rival to the Democrats in the 1850s, though a steady procession of third-party movements, breakaway insurgencies and charismatic leaders (from Theodore Roosevelt to Ross Perot) have regularly offered alternatives. Invariably, reports of the demise of either or both parties have proven premature. During the Civil War, Democrats seemed so tainted by the stain of rebellion that one pro-Republican newspaper editor dismissed them as "a myth, a reminiscence, a voice from the tomb, an ancient, fishlike smell." Both Barry Goldwater's landslide defeat in 1964 and Watergate 10 years later seemed to threaten the Republicans with marginalization. In the 1980s and 1990s, many commentators thought the rise in independent voters challenged the relevance of both parties. </p>
<p>
Yet as the 21st century begins, the parties appear not only relevant but vital in shaping the way Americans look at politics. After all the focus on independent and swing voters in the early and mid-1990s (from soccer moms to Perotistas), America appears to have made a sharp turn into an era of intense partisanship. The gap in the approval ratings President Bush receives from Republicans (around 90 percent) and Democrats (usually less than 30 percent) is the widest ever recorded in polling. Party-line voting is rising in Congress. Crossover voting in presidential and congressional elections appears to be declining. In 2000, fully nine of 10 Republicans voted for George W. Bush, while nearly that high a percentage of Democrats voted for Al Gore.</p>
<p>
Enough voters still call themselves independents that neither party can claim a stable majority of support. But many political operatives believe the number who don't at least lean strongly toward one party or the other is now much smaller -- perhaps less than 10 percent of the electorate -- than was commonly assumed 10 and 20 years ago. </p>
<p>
In this climate of heightened partisanship and sharpening polarization, strategists in both parties have been shifting their emphasis from courting swing voters to mobilizing and exciting their bases. On virtually every major issue -- from the environment to taxes to the prosecution of the war in Iraq without broad international support -- Bush has chosen policies far more popular with his conservative base than among swing voters. The move toward the base isn't as uniform among the 2004 Democratic presidential contenders. But on a series of major issues -- from affirmative action to gay rights to free trade and the level of domestic spending they are willing to propose -- most of the leading candidates are perceptibly tilting away from the centrism associated with Bill Clinton and toward more traditionally liberal positions popular with the party core. In Congress, meanwhile, the ideological gap between the parties has widened to a chasm with the decline of both the northeastern center-left Republican and the southern center-right Democrat. Only a few years after some analysts worried that the two parties were converging into a bland middle, ideological differences appear sharper than they've been in decades.</p>
<p>
For all of their continuing importance, however, the political parties have been slighted by historians. Excellent accounts of the electoral and intellectual competition between the parties are available in works that examine discrete periods in American history, such as David M. Potter's classic study of antebellum America, <i>The Impending Crisis</i>, or Arthur M. Schlesinger's monumental accounts of the Andrew Jackson and Franklin D. Roosevelt presidencies. But popular histories of the two political parties as institutions have been difficult to find.</p>
<p>
Not anymore. In a hugely ambitious project, Random House is simultaneously publishing narrative histories of the Republican Party, by University of Texas historian Lewis L. Gould, and the Democratic Party, by veteran political journalist Jules Witcover. It's a grandly conceived effort written by two authors whose enormous knowledge of American politics is matched by their obvious affection for it. Still, the project is a mixed success.</p>
<p>
Overall, Witcover has written a more sprightly and entertaining book. Yet the two works share many common strengths and weaknesses. The best thing about both books is their inclusiveness. These are by far the most comprehensive histories of the political parties I've seen under one cover. For political junkies, it's all here: all the highlights and many of the forgotten moments in the development of both parties and their 150-year rivalry -- everything from "Ma, Ma, where's my pa? Gone to the White House, Ha! Ha! Ha!" (the taunt Republicans aimed at Grover Cleveland over reports that he had fathered an illegitimate child) to "Where's the beef?" (the missile Walter Mondale fired to knock Gary Hart out of orbit during a debate in the 1984 Democratic primary). Free-soil advocates, copperheads, stalwarts, half-breeds, Mugwumps -- warriors in political fights long forgotten -- all parade through the pages of these books. </p>
<p>
The long view both authors provide offers fresh perspective on many of today's political arguments. When Arnold Schwarzenegger complains that Democratic taxes dog Californians through every step of their day, I wonder if he knew he was channeling the Democratic attack on Republican high-tariff policies in the 1890s that Gould quotes: "The McKinley [tariff] is with us always, at the table, at the bedside, in the kitchen, in the barn, in the churches and to the cemetery." Those liberals who complain that the centrist Democratic Leadership Council has tried to usurp the proper role of the national party over the past 15 years might be surprised to learn that the liberal-dominated Democratic Advisory Council faced the same charge in the late 1950s when it tried to redefine a party then dominated by a conservative congressional leadership. And amid all of today's political bitterness in Washington, it's refreshing to be reminded that Thomas Jefferson once complained, "Men who have been intimate all their lives cross the street to avoid meeting, and turn their heads another way, lest they be obliged to touch their hats." That was during John Adams' presidency.</p>
<p>
Witcover in particular has a knack for unearthing surprising facts; every few pages taught me something new. Did you know that a cartoonist named Rollin Kirby helped cement the identity of Franklin Roosevelt's 100-day agenda as the New Deal? Or that delegates for the presidential nominating convention were selected through primaries for the first time in 1912? Or that the Anti-Masons, a third party devoted to combating the Society of Freemasons, held the first national political convention in September 1831? Both books, but especially Witcover's, display a breathtaking amount of research.</p>
<p>
The authors also advance some provocative judgments. Gould modestly attempts to refurbish the reputations of such middling GOP presidents as Rutherford B. Hayes and Calvin Coolidge. And he spikes his generally favorable history of the Republicans with the tough judgment that the party too often -- from the Civil War through Joe McCarthy -- has portrayed its Democratic rivals as not just wrong or misguided but unpatriotic and disloyal. For his part, Witcover is unsparing on the ideological confusion of today's Democrats. </p>
<p>
Unfortunately, neither author spends enough time assessing the implications of the facts they have collected. Each focuses far more on narrative than analysis. Both books slight the intellectual history of the parties. Gould is more conscientious than Witcover about tracking the shifts in the two parties' thinking over time; but often Gould simply identifies the change (such as the rise in Republican isolationism after World War I) without explaining its cause. Both books could likewise have benefited from more social history that explored how demographic changes (such as the movement to the suburbs after World War II) have affected the parties' fortunes.</p>
<p>
Instead, the emphasis in both books is on recounting elections, especially presidential elections. At times that produces significant rewards. Witcover offers a fascinating history of how presidential campaigns were conducted in the early 19th century. But the focus on the presidency is too constricting in both books. By dwelling so heavily on presidential races and the administrations they produce, the authors say too little about members of Congress -- much less governors or intellectuals -- who have been important in shaping their party's agendas and viewpoints over the years. Meanwhile, too much of the presidential history they recount has been covered, in greater depth, elsewhere. </p>
<p>
Neither book spends much time addressing the threshold question of why the parties have endured for so long when so much in American life has changed around them. Yet both offer clues to the answer.</p>
<p>
One obvious factor has been that the parties have also changed during their long lives. Both have been remarkably resilient and adaptable. Through almost all of the 19th century, the Democrats were the small-government, states-rights party. Meanwhile, the Republicans, born to resist the spread of slavery, offered an agenda of federal activism sweeping in its ambition. As Gould writes, "[T]hey established a national banking system, imposed an income tax, created a system for dispersing public land in the West, and started a transcontinental railroad." Today, of course, the two sides have completely reversed roles; it is Republican leaders in the executive branch, Congress and the courts who mouth the arguments of 19th-century limited-government Democrats.</p>
<p>
These evolving positions, though, don't so much explain the parties' durability as point to the real secret of their success. In revising their views, the parties have followed the shifting interests of their core constituencies. Though each party's electoral coalition has evolved substantially over time, the Republicans have always been the party most identified with business, while Democrats focused most on courting average working people. Republicans favored activist government during the Lincoln administration, when business needed government assistance to build roads and railroads; when business later recoiled against government regulation and taxes, most Republicans followed. Likewise, the Democrats abandoned their resistance to federal activism at the turn of the 20th century when union leaders, agrarian activists and other social reformers flowing into the party came to see Washington as an indispensable counterweight to the growing power of corporate America.</p>
<p>
So while the parties' views have evolved, their allegiances to the interests of their constituencies have remained constant. That may be the key to their survival. The most important divisions in American politics today aren't solely the class lines between capital and labor; cultural attitudes toward issues such as abortion, gay rights and gun control are now at least as important in driving voters' choices. But whether the cause is cultural or economic, the one guarantee in a society this big and diverse is that interests will clash. The parties endure, above all, because they have proven the most effective vehicles for those contending interests to advance their causes in the political arena where any democratic society resolves its disputes. Jefferson, again, got it right, in a letter that Witcover quotes: "In every free and deliberating society, there must, from the nature of man, be opposite parties ... ."</p>
<p>
It's telling that the greatest threats to the dominance of the parties have come when both have ignored a significant interest in society. The Republicans were born in 1854 when neither the Whigs nor Democrats would reflect the anti-slavery outrage over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which cleared the way for slaveholding to spread through the territories. Likewise, the failure of both parties to respond to farmers and workers fearful of emerging corporate power during the Gilded Age led to the formidable challenge of the Populist Party (which Democrats eventually stifled by adopting much of their agenda). Perot's rise in the early 1990s, and the intense interest that swirled around potential third-party bids from Colin Powell and John McCain later, suggested the parties could theoretically open the door for a centrist competitor by diverging too sharply and alienating voters in the middle. But these twin histories show that in practice the parties have mostly run into trouble when they converge too closely and leave too many voters feeling disenfranchised by a cramped consensus.</p>
<p>
By that test, the parties appear in strong shape today. The Democrats might not confront business aggressively enough for those attracted to the Greens, and Republicans might be too timid in slashing big government for the libertarians. But few Americans are likely to complain that they are being presented with an echo, not a choice, in 2004. President Bush and whichever candidate the Democrats nominate are on track for an election that will offer voters a stark choice on the full range of domestic and foreign issues (even the Democrats who supported the war in Iraq have been loudly condemning Bush's broader approach to international affairs). Everything points toward a presidential campaign that will be polarizing, acrimonious and probably quite bitter -- all the ingredients that make for the life of the parties.</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 27 Oct 2003 18:00:24 +0000143125 at https://prospect.orgRonald BrownsteinThe War About Warhttps://prospect.org/article/war-about-war-0
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><blockquote><p>
<b>The War Over Iraq: Saddam's Tyranny and America's Mission</b><br /><br />
By Lawrence F. Kaplan and William Kristol, Encounter Books, 153 pages, $25.95
</p></blockquote>
<p>The confrontation with Iraq is a war in service of an idea. The idea is what has come to be known as preemption -- President Bush's frequently expressed belief that after the September 11 terrorist attacks, the United States must strike proactively against regimes that develop weapons of mass destruction, harbor terrorists or both. That was the centerpiece of Bush's closing argument to the American public in his final pre-war speech two nights before the invasion began. Even at that late moment, Bush did not try to portray Iraq as an imminent threat to American national security. Nor did he point to a specific provocation from Saddam Hussein -- such as the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 -- that demanded an immediate response. In justifying war, Bush instead leaned most heavily on the risk that Iraq might someday provide terrorists with weapons of mass destruction. That danger, he insisted, compelled the United States to move preemptively. "Before the day of horror can come, before it is too late to act," Bush said, "this danger will be removed." Not since the heyday of the domino theory in Vietnam has an idea provided so much of the motivation for a war. </p>
<p>
To an unusual degree, it's possible to trace the intellectual pedigree of the idea that has carried a quarter-million American and British troops into Iraq. Bush, after promising a more "humble" foreign policy in 2000, didn't become a convert to preemption until the attacks on New York and Washington convinced him that the mission of his presidency is to fight global terrorism. But the roots of this Bush doctrine trace back to the thinking through the 1990s of neoconservative foreign-policy analysts such as Paul Wolfowitz (now the deputy secretary of defense), Richard Perle (former chairman of the advisory Defense Policy Board) and Republican strategist William Kristol, the editor of the neocon magazine <i>The Weekly Standard</i>. Long before terrorists struck New York and Washington -- and, for that matter, long before Bush took office -- the Kristol-organized Project for a New American Century had issued a manifesto signed by, among others, Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld (now secretary of defense) and I. Lewis Libby (now Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff) insisting that the United States must "challenge regimes hostile to our values and interests" and build "an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity and our principles." For many of the neoconservatives, deposing Saddam Hussein has long been the essential first step on that road. </p>
<p>
The neocons aren't the only faction shaping the Bush administration's foreign-policy thinking; the Department of State remains an outpost of more traditional (and cautious) Republican internationalist views. But with the general support of Rumsfeld and Cheney, the neocons increasingly appear to be the dominant group. Though Bush balances these contending viewpoints -- he favored the State Department over the neocons, for instance, simply by agreeing to engage the United Nations on Iraq last year -- he seems personally most drawn to the neoconservative perspective. And that makes the neocons' thinking an important guide not only to how the administration got to Iraq but where it might go from there. </p>
<p>
Conveniently enough, a pair of leading neoconservative foreign-policy thinkers, Kristol and <i>New Republic</i> senior writer Lawrence F. Kaplan, have provided just such a road map in their new book, <i>The War Over Iraq</i>. It's not an epic work. The book is thin, and though smoothly written, feels a bit hurried; it's less a scholar's text than a lawyer's brief. Events have already overtaken its specific arguments for invading Iraq. But the book remains fascinating for the broader window it opens into the worldview developing among the neocon thinkers inside and outside the administration. </p>
<p>
It turns out the neocons are thinking big. Very big.</p>
<p>
To Kristol and Kaplan, the lesson of September 11 is unequivocal: The United States must act decisively against potential dangers, with allies if possible but alone when necessary. They see Iraq as the template for a new global order built on the unapologetic assertion of American power. "The maintenance of a decent and hospitable international order requires continued American leadership in resisting, and where possible undermining, aggressive dictators and hostile ideologies," they write. Actually, even that sweeping declaration understates their aims. Kristol and Kaplan envision a world organized not around "American leadership" but "American preeminence" and "American dominance" enforced by a bigger military deployed aggressively against emerging threats. The threat posed by terrorists and outlaw regimes, they insist, is now so great that the world faces a fundamental choice. One option offers a "humane future" built around an "American foreign policy that is unapologetic, idealistic, assertive and well funded." The other is "a chaotic, Hobbesian world where there is no authority to thwart aggression, ensure peace and security or enforce international norms." Monte, I will definitely take door No. 1. </p>
<p>
Yet those, obviously, aren't the only choices available. Like many polemicists of left and right, Kristol and Kaplan don't entirely play fair in setting out the choices or describing their opposition. In presenting their vision of an unfettered, unilateral American colossus, they caustically dismiss the idea that the United States might be able to increase its security and advance its foreign-policy aims in ways that are less alienating to the other 6 billion or so people on the planet. They see only a blame-America-first mindset in the demands from many Democrats, and even some Republicans, for Bush to display more commitment to international institutions and more concern for the views of other nations. That "impulse owes <i>entirely</i> [emphasis added] to the lingering suspicion that American self-interest and the interests of humanity are inherently incompatible," they write. </p>
<p>
But that's silly. In fact, American self-interest, not a bleeding-heart concern about the interests of humanity, is the principal reason why even most Democrats who backed the war in Iraq -- such as Sens. (and presidential candidates) John Kerry (Mass.), John Edwards (N.C.) and Joseph Lieberman (Conn.) -- and moderate Republicans such as Sen. Chuck Hagel (Neb.) have urged Bush to work more closely with other nations. While no one in this internationalist camp categorically rules out the unilateral use of force, all argue that strengthening alliances will enhance our security by tempering hostility toward American power and fostering the cooperation we need to combat terrorism and proliferation. As Kerry put it in a speech earlier this year, "Leading the world's most advanced democracies isn't mushy multilateralism -- it amplifies America's voice and extends our reach." British Prime Minister Tony Blair often says the same thing, though somewhat more delicately.</p>
<p>
Kristol and Kaplan believe that's wishful thinking: "Those who suggest that ... international resentments could somehow be eliminated by a more restrained foreign policy are deluding themselves," they write. Instead, they maintain that if the United States leads strongly enough, others, however reluctantly, will follow. All signs suggest that Bush agrees. Yet the early evidence on that experiment isn't encouraging. The White House believes, with some justification, that the UN Security Council only agreed to resume inspections inside Iraq because it knew that if it refused, Bush might invade anyway. But one reason Bush couldn't win a second UN resolution authorizing the invasion was that he made clear he was interested in what other countries thought only to the extent that they agreed with what he wanted to do anyway. Bush's determination has carried the troops to Iraq, but at a high cost: the greatest rupture in the Atlantic alliance since at least the Suez crisis in 1956; the inability to win support even from such hemispheric neighbors as Canada, Mexico and Chile; and growing public hostility toward America across Europe, as measured not only in protests but in polls. </p>
<p>
It's not clear any of that concerns Kristol and Kaplan much. While the authors make the obligatory bows to the importance of alliances, they give the impression they don't believe Europe, any individual country, the United Nations or any entity that doesn't take orders directly from Donald Rumsfeld has much to offer to international security. Only an "American-led world order," they insist, can hold back the forces of chaos and disorder.</p>
<p>
To read such declarations from Kristol and Kagan is to realize how great a gulf separates the two camps supporting the war with Iraq. The neoconservatives see the overthrow of Saddam Hussein mainly as a way to demonstrate American strength and resolve and thus send a shot across the bow of other rogue states such as Iran and North Korea; that seems largely Bush's intent as well. The internationalists backing the war -- the leading pro-war U.S. Democrats, a handful of Republican moderates such as Hagel and, above all, Blair -- had been hoping for something very different. They wanted the war to demonstrate that the world could unite to cooperatively confront the new dangers of the 21st century; that's why securing UN authorization for the attack was a much higher priority for them than it was for Bush (much less the neocons).</p>
<p>
These two camps share a common desire to disarm Iraq. But that convergence obscures as much as it reveals: The two sides hold very different views of how the world should be organized to meet the threats of the new century. On both sides of the Atlantic, the internationalists believe the United States can best achieve its aims, and diminish the resentment of its power, by cultivating allies and strengthening international institutions. The neoconservatives believe something very close to the opposite: Their focus is on shedding commitments that constrain unilateral American action. Blair and the American internationalists want to reform and reinvigorate the United Nations; the neocons want to marginalize it (if not raze it entirely). Blair is urging international initiatives to fight global warming and poverty and to genuinely pressure the Israelis and Palestinians toward peace. The neocons are dubious of all those ideas. </p>
<p>
Bush leans strongly toward the neocons on all of these questions; the leading Democratic presidential contenders for 2004 all side with the internationalists. The shared purpose in Iraq has thus far overshadowed these conflicts. But once the shooting stops in Baghdad, they are sure to resurface -- subtly in the contrasts between Bush and Blair and loudly in the foreign-policy arguments between Bush and his Democratic opponents in 2004. The war over the meaning of the war in Iraq is likely to last much longer than the fighting in Iraq itself.</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 14 Apr 2003 16:53:42 +0000142999 at https://prospect.orgRonald BrownsteinThe Bush Breakthroughhttps://prospect.org/article/bush-breakthrough
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>In numerical terms, the losses Democrats suffered in last week's election were not that large. But psychologically they could hardly have been more devastating.</p>
<p>The unexpected reversals instantly set off a crisis of confidence among Democrats in Washington. In the usual manner of the capital, groups from every point on the ideological spectrum interpreted the results as new justification for what they wanted to do anyway. The liberal Americans for Democratic Action saw the losses as proof the party had lost its edge in a fruitless search for "the mushy middle." Not surprisingly, the Democratic Leadership Council took home exactly the opposite message: "After four straight election cycles of campaigning on an agenda pretty much limited to promising the moon on prescription drugs and attacking Republicans on Social Security, it's time for the congressional wing of the party, and the political consultants who have relentlessly promoted this message . . . to bury it once and for all."</p>
<p>About the only thing all factions could agree on was that party chairman Terry McAuliffe was either disingenuous or deluded when he insisted on the morning after the debacle: "If the Republicans had an edge over us yesterday, it was tactical rather than ideological."</p>
<p>In fact, the results were disappointing for Democrats on so many different fronts that, McAuliffe apart, they provide evidence for all these explanations. Surely, the Democratic failure to develop a systematic critique of President Bush's economic policy contributed to their inability to benefit from the electorate's anxiety about the economy (a point on which the DLC agrees with the ADA).</p>
<p>In most competitive races, Democrats made a devil's bargain by endorsing the 10-year $1.3 trillion Bush tax cut. (Of the seven leading Democratic challengers for a Republican-held Senate seat, all but Erskine Bowles in North Carolina pledged to support the tax cut and oppose any effort to retrench it; Jeanne Shaheen in New Hampshire and Ron Kirk in Texas even ran ads touting their support.) That posture helped them blunt Republican efforts to paint them as tax-and-spend liberals. But as Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg noted, that tactical advantage came at a high cost. "How could you make his economic policy the heart of the problem as to what is causing the slow economy if you endorse his principal economic policy?" Greenberg asked.</p>
<p>But just as in Al Gore's 2000 campaign, this election once again demonstrated that bribing seniors with an unrealistically expensive prescription drug plan is not nearly as powerful a magnet for votes as most Democrats believe. In political terms, prescription drugs is like a baseball prospect that looks great on paper, and even in practice, but simply cannot deliver when it counts.</p>
<p>The problem was more fundamental than the limits of that one program. Most Democratic candidates this year built their campaigns around targeted programs, not broad themes. Candidates talked about pension protection, or raising the minimum wage, or providing seniors with prescription drugs, or opposing individual investment accounts under Social Security. But hardly any Democratic candidates in serious races offered a broader vision for reviving the economy, and few offered an alternative to Bush's vision of what America must do to safeguard itself against the risk of terrorism. The result was to cede the field to the president on the two issues most important to voters -- national security and the economy -- in the hope of winning the election on secondary concerns where polls showed the electorate favored Democrats. That was a strategy eerily reminiscent of Democrats in the 1980s. It may have been appropriate that the campaign saw Walter Mondale briefly emerge from retirement, because many Democrats this year sounded more like Mondale than Bill Clinton -- trying to pick off individual constituencies with specific programmatic promises rather than offering a broader message of economic opportunity, personal responsibility, national strength and government reform (an idea that has almost completely vanished from the Democratic lexicon).</p>
<p>The Democratic Congressional leadership is understandably taking heat for this failure; but the similarity to the party's troubles in the 1980s point to a larger explanation. It simply may not be possible for Congressional Democrats, with all their regional and ideological differences, to agree on an overarching national message. In part, Democrats were left with such a threadbare agenda for this campaign because these were the only points that all elements of the party could accept. As party strategists never tired of insisting through the fall, Democrats could not make opposition to Bush's tax cut a centerpiece of their national message because so many Congressional Democrats (28 in the House, 12 in the Senate) had supported it, and many challengers were embracing it too.</p>
<p>The geography of this election also contributed to the Democratic caution. Most of the key races were fought on Bush-leaning turf in culturally conservative places. Of the 11 Senate races considered the most competitive, nine were in "red" states that Bush won in 2000; a disproportionate number of the competitive House seats were in rural or small-town districts that favored Bush. (Indeed almost all of the Republican House gains came in seats that Bush carried in 2000.) Through the fall, as grumbling over the mushiness of the Democratic message mounted in Washington, the universal response from top party strategists was that no candidate in any of these races would benefit from a more confrontational national posture on the tax cut or the war in Iraq; if anything they wanted national Democrats to hug Bush even more.</p>
<p>This problem for Congressional Democrats isn't going away any time soon. Al Gore may have won more votes than Bush in 2000, but Bush won more states -- 30 in all. The House is divided almost exactly in half between seats in the red (218) and blue (217) states. But the Senate's small-state bias gives the red states disproportionate influence there: Sixty of the 100 Senators are elected from red states. Democrats now hold just 18 of those 60 seats (19 if Mary Landrieu wins her run-off in Louisiana next month).</p>
<p>Over the past two years, the Senate leadership has been repeatedly hamstrung by the reluctance of the surviving red-state Democratic senators to vote against Bush (on issues from the tax cut to fuel economy standards). In 2004, nine of the 19 Democratic senators up for reelection will be running in states Bush won -- six of them in states he carried by double digits. With Bush actually on the ballot, they will probably be even more reluctant to oppose him. That may help explain why even after all of the election-night criticism, Tom Daschle, transitioning from Senate majority to Senate minority leader, still told reporters he saw no reason for Democrats to attempt to roll back Bush's tax cut --even just to clarify the party differences -- in the upcoming session.</p>
<p>Which suggests that an agenda of sharper opposition to Bush is much more likely to come from the Democrats' 2004 presidential candidates than from Congress. Overshadowed by the debate over Iraq, and then the mid-term election itself, that process has already begun; likely Democratic contenders such as Senators John Kerry, John Edwards and Joe Lieberman (who will run only if Al Gore doesn't) already have called for rescinding later stages of the Bush tax cut, and using the money either for short-term rebates, new investments or reducing the deficit. Kerry and Lieberman, in particular, have also begun articulating a critique of Bush's approach to foreign policy, not so much from the left as a muscular center that insists on American engagement abroad but affirms the value of working through alliances. If anything, the widespread frustration over the party's anemic 2002 performance will increase pressure on the 2004 contenders to be bolder both in articulating their own ideas and critiquing Bush's.</p>
<p>Yet no Democrat should underestimate the challenge for 2004 that last week's results present. It's true that mid-term elections don't always provide a reliable signal about the presidential elections that follow two years later. Sometimes big gains in the mid-term have foreshadowed a presidential victory two years later (as it did for Democrats, say in 1930 or 1958, and Republicans in 1950 and 1966), but often it doesn't: After Republicans cleaned Clinton's clock in 1994, he returned to win the White House two years later -- only to see the GOP retake the Oval Office in 2000, just two years after Clinton defied history by winning five House seats during his second mid-term. Too many idiosyncratic factors -- local controversies, a talent gap between candidates -- produce a mid-term result for it to provide a precise gauge of the party's national strengths.</p>
<p>But even with those caveats, these results have to be sobering for Democrats. The best evidence suggests that the key to the GOP success wasn't a vast realignment of swing voters; Democrats last week held on to many of the gains with moderate voters they have made over the past decade. Instead the key was that the central elements of the Republican coalition surged to the polls to support George W. Bush. Which suggests that, absent a major change in the environment, Democrats will face enormous challenges in 2004 peeling away almost any of the states that Bush won last time.</p>
<p>Under Clinton in the 1990s, the biggest Democratic advance came in socially-liberal affluent suburbs outside of the South. These leafy communities -- like Oakland County outside Detroit or Bergen County in New Jersey -- had voted reliably Republican while the GOP dominated the White House from 1968 through 1988. But Clinton's combination of social liberalism (on issues like the environment, abortion and gun control) and fiscal moderation realigned those voters to the Democratic Party; in their new book, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira see the well-educated professionals who live in these places as a cornerstone of what they predict will be "The Emerging Democratic Majority."</p>
<p>For the most part, Democrats held on to these places in the most hotly contested races last week. In some instances, their margins may have slipped a bit from Clinton-era levels. But Democrat Frank Lautenberg still won big victories in Passaic, Bergen and Middlesex counties as he captured a New Jersey Senate seat. Democrat Jennifer Granholm held onto Oakland County as she won the Michigan governorship. Ed Rendell, en route to an easy victory in the Pennsylvania governor's race, piled up massive margins in the suburban Philadelphia counties that were once reliably Republican. And Gray Davis held the socially-liberal coastal counties in California, routing Republican Bill Simon, for instance, among the techies in Santa Clara County.</p>
<p>But Democrats lost the election because Republicans turned out so strongly in the red states, and the red counties of the blue states. In Georgia, Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes ran up a larger margin in Atlanta than he did in his victorious 1998 race; overall, he won just 9,000 fewer votes in losing this time than he captured in winning last time. But his Republican opponent, Sonny Perdue, polled nearly 250,000 more votes than the 1998 GOP nominee. In the far distant suburbs of Atlanta -- culturally conservative exurban counties like Douglas, Hall, Henry, Coweta and Forsyth -- the Republican margin doubled, tripled or quadrupled from 1998. Following Bush's pattern in 2000, the GOP scored big gains in rural areas, too.</p>
<p>The same trends were apparent in Republican Norm Coleman's solid win over Walter Mondale in the Minnesota Senate race. Mondale held the twin cities and their immediate suburbs (though his margin slipped a bit from Paul Wellstone's showing in 1996). But Mondale gave ground across the broad expanses of rural Minnesota: say in Otter Tail, which gave the GOP a 1,300 vote margin in 1996 and a nearly 4,100 vote advantage this time, or Beltrami where a 2,200 Democratic margin in 1996 slipped to just 200 votes this time. He lost even more ground in the exurban counties at the suburban fringe around Minneapolis and St. Paul. In these rapidly growing places -- bursting with young parents eager to raise families far from the temptations of city life -- Coleman ran up crushing margins: almost 12,000 votes in Carver, nearly 21,000 in Anoka, 28,000 in Dakota and 11,000 in Wright.</p>
<p>In many states, the Republican surge overwhelmed entirely respectable turnouts for Democrats. In losing the North Carolina Senate race last week, for instance, Democrat Erskine Bowles won 214 more votes than John Edwards did in winning a seat there in 1998. In Missouri, Jean Carnahan won more votes than her Republican colleague Christopher (Kit) Bond did in the 1998 mid-term election there. In Georgia, Democratic Sen. Max Cleland was crushed by more than 100,000 votes, but captured less than 4,000 fewer votes than the late Republican Sen. Paul Coverdell did when he won his seat in 1998. Bill McBride was flattened in the Florida governor's race, but in losing, he polled only 60,000 fewer votes than Jeb Bush did when he was initially elected four years ago.</p>
<p>It's hard to avoid the message that the Republican base, especially in the red states, feels an electric personal connection to George W. Bush sufficient to march them off the couch into the voting booth. Unless the bottom falls out off the economy, or the likely war in Iraq proves a fiasco -- in other words, in anything approaching current circumstances -- that will make it very difficult to challenge Bush in almost any of the states he won last time. Before Tuesday's election, Democratic strategists may have dreamed of adding Colorado (where the late Republican surge carried bland GOP Sen. Wayne Allard Tuesday to a stunningly easy win over Democrat Tom Strickland) or Georgia or North Carolina to the list of states they might hope to contest in 2004. After the results, it's difficult to see how any realistic evaluation would give the Democrats much chance in those places. Indeed, if the Tuesday results are to change the presidential playing field, it is to lengthen the list of possible targets for Bush: the results offered a virtual roadmap for how he might mobilize the culturally conservative voters most attuned to his national security message to challenge for 2000 Gore states like Minnesota, Wisconsin, Oregon and even, maybe, conceivably, California (where Davis collapsed in virtually every inland county from Sacramento to San Bernadino).</p>
<p>By themselves, Tuesday's results don't suggest a decisive break in the 50-50 split that has characterized American politics since the mid-1990s. An election day poll by the GOP firm Public Opinion Strategies -- the best numbers we have until (if ever) the exit polls are concluded -- showed that Democrats still narrowly carried independent and moderate voters, who loom larger in a presidential election than they do in an off-year vote. And, despite all the tumult, the Republican gains, by the numbers, will be relatively modest: five to seven House seats when the last races are decided, two seats in the Senate (three if they can unseat Landrieu next month).</p>
<p>But within this broad parity, the election does hint at a tilt toward the GOP, especially as long as national security and terrorism issues loom so large for voters. Because redistricting so dramatically reduced the number of competitive House races, Democrats will face a formidable challenge in the next few years winning enough seats to recapture the lower chamber; to win back the House, Democrats will have to do what they almost completely failed to do this time, which is unseat Republicans districts that voted for Bush in 2000. The disproportionate representation of the red states looms as a similar barrier to a Democratic majority in the Senate: To take back the Senate, Democrats will have to capture seats in states that supported Bush, not an easy challenge when a popular president is asking voters to send him a cooperative Congress. Finally, the depth of Bush's hold on the red states should give him a significant tactical advantage in 2004. With so much of his base locked down before the race even begins, Bush will be free to focus enormous resources on the few states in his coalition where Democrats can compete -- a list realistically not much longer than Florida, Nevada and, maybe, at the margin, Missouri, New Hampshire, Tennessee, Arkansas and Arizona -- as well as the shakiest states on the Democratic side, like Minnesota, Wisconsin and Oregon.</p>
<p>Sentiments change so fast in the modern media age that nothing is guaranteed anymore in politics. Bush's success Tuesday doesn't settle the 2004 race any more than Clinton's unexpected gains in 1998 guaranteed a Democratic victory in 2000. But in this election, Bush has shown enormous assets -- an intense appeal to his base, an improving standing among swing voters and a disciplined capacity to shape the campaign dialogue around the issues most favorable to him. As Bush himself might say, after this performance it wouldn't be wise for anyone to misunderestimate him again.</p>
<p><i>Ronald Brownstein is a national political correspondent and columnist for the </i>Los Angeles Times<i>.</i></p>
<p></p></div></div></div>Tue, 12 Nov 2002 09:10:41 +0000139994 at https://prospect.orgRonald BrownsteinBooks in Reviewhttps://prospect.org/article/books-review-2
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><b>The Emerging Democratic Majority</b><br /><br />
By John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira. Scribner, 213 pages, $24.00</p>
<p>
<span class="dropcap">W</span>ith the 2002 campaign in its final days, the two parties are engaged in a form of trench warfare. Neither side is expecting a big breakthrough this November. There seems little chance that Republicans will significantly pad their margin in the House or that Democrats will significantly enlarge their fragile one-seat majority in the Senate. Either side could just as easily lose control in the chamber it now holds. Looking state by state and district by district, it's possible to construct scenarios in which either party runs well enough to control either chamber. But when all the votes are counted, the odds are high that on both sides of Capitol Hill, the margin of control will be low.</p>
<p>
The prospect of another narrowly divided election follows a 2000 campaign that split the country almost exactly in half. Indeed, viewed from all angles, the 2000 result was probably the closest thing to a tie since the elections of 1880. George W. Bush's four-vote margin over Al Gore was the second smallest in the Electoral College ever (exceeded only by the one-vote victory of Rutherford B. Hayes over Samuel Tilden in the equally disputed election of 1876). Bush became the first candidate in more than a century to win the presidency while losing the popular vote. Voters initially returned a Senate deadlocked 50-to-50. And while Republicans maintained their slim House majority, the two parties received almost exactly the same number of votes in the 435 House races nationwide. </p>
<p>
The parties emerged from the 2000 election in a form of polarized parity. After the last hanging chad was swept away, the election's emblem instantly became the vivid maps that divided America into the red (Bush) and blue (Gore) counties. The map showed a country separated more along lines of culture than economics. Gore dominated the coasts and the more cosmopolitan population centers of the upper Midwest. Bush swept the inland regions: the South, the Great Plains, the Mountain States and virtually all of small-town America. He seemed to win, in short, every county in America with a cow in it. </p>
<p>
Cultural affinities loomed so large in the voting that it almost seemed as if the candidates held one election and the country another. Bush and Gore spent most of their time arguing about bread-and-butter issues such as tax cuts and Social Security; neither wanted to talk much about polarizing social issues such as gun control or abortion. Yet values seemed to drive voters much more than interests. The frequency of church attendance, for instance, was a much better predictor of the vote than income, especially among white voters. (The more often voters attended church, the more likely they were to support Bush.) Likewise, gun ownership was a better predictor of the vote than stock ownership. (About 60 percent of voters in houses with a gun voted for Bush; about 60 percent of those who didn't own guns voted for Gore.) The election presented a picture of two mirror-image coalitions (the Democrats mostly secular, urban, female and socially liberal, the Republicans heavily religious, rural, male and socially conservative) so evenly matched that neither could establish a lasting or decisive advantage over the other.</p>
<p>
Now come John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira to argue that, over the long run, demographic and economic change will inexorably tilt the advantage toward the Democratic side in this cultural standoff. "If American history were running in reverse, and if the country were becoming a primarily rural nation again, then the Republicans would enjoy a distinct demographic advantage," they write in their new book <i>The Emerging Democratic Majority</i>. "But history continues to run in the precise opposite direction."</p>
<p>
Prediction is the opiate of political reporters. The authors have consciously modeled their work on former GOP strategist Kevin Phillips' 1969 classic, <i>The Emerging Republican Majority</i>, which accurately forecast the Republican dominance of the White House that lasted for a quarter-century after 1968. But the path to Democratic dominance isn't as clear as Judis and Teixeira suggest. For one thing, the party's retreat in culturally conservative rural America will make it difficult for Democrats to win the Senate (where small rural states have disproportionate influence) and could threaten the Democratic hold on midwestern states (such as Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin) that the authors consider part of the party's geographic base in presidential politics. In an age of mass terrorism, a renewed Republican advantage on defense and national security may also prove more of a lasting hurdle for Democrats than the authors believe. </p>
<p>
But you don't need to entirely accept this book's vision of the future to appreciate its compelling analysis of the present and the recent past in American politics. Whatever its success as prophecy, the authors have produced one of the freshest looks in years at the changing dynamics of American elections. Their analysis -- particularly of the role of "postindustrial" cities in the new Democratic coalition -- will be eye opening to even hardcore political junkies. Thinkers in both parties will have to grapple with their insights.</p>
<p>
At bottom, Judis and Teixeira present a straightforward thesis: Democrats are moving toward majority status because the constituencies favorable to them are growing as a share of the electorate, while Republicans are strongest with groups and in regions that are, relatively, declining in influence. The authors see a modern Democratic coalition with three critical pillars. One is women, especially single women, women who work outside the home and college-educated women -- all of whom tend to be more socially liberal and open to government activism than other elements in American society. It is difficult to overstate how reliant Democrats have become on these women. Unlike in 1996, when men split relatively evenly between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole, Bush carried men over Gore by a resounding double-digit margin; in 12 of the states that Gore carried, the authors calculate, he lost most male voters and won only because of solid majorities among women. If anything, it's reasonable to project that Bush's successes as a wartime leader will benefit him relatively more among men than women in 2004, meaning that the next Democratic nominee will be even more dependent on women's votes.</p>
<p>
Judis and Teixeira also identify a second familiar pillar of Democratic dominance: minority voters. The large turnout of overwhelmingly Democratic African Americans boosted Gore in states from Michigan to Florida in 2000. But more critical for the long-term balance of power between the parties may be Hispanics, who now constitute a slightly larger share of the population than blacks. </p>
<p>
Though Hispanics' voting participation has lagged, their enormous growth has already been key to Democratic advances in California, Nevada and Florida (where the increase in non-Cuban Hispanics helps explain why the state has become a toss-up in presidential politics after voting so solidly Republican from 1968 through 1992). Over time, Hispanic population growth could strengthen Democratic prospects in Arizona, Colorado and even Texas (a process Tony Sanchez, the Democrats' gubernatorial nominee, is trying to hasten this year). The rising Hispanic presence explains why some Democratic strategists believe the party is more likely to make gains in the West than in the South over the next decade or so. </p>
<p>
The third pillar the authors identify will probably surprise readers who group both Judis and Teixeira within the wing of the Democratic Party committed to economic populism and focused on recapturing more of the white working class. Instead, the authors see more potential for Democrats to garner votes from such well-educated professionals as architects, doctors, social workers and teachers. Once reliably Republican, these workers, who now constitute as much as one-fifth of the electorate, have become a solid Democratic bloc. This is partly because the fiscally conservative Clinton-era Democratic Party has become more acceptable to them economically, but largely because the Democrats hold liberal views on such social issues as the environment and women's rights. Strikingly, the authors seem to hold out more hope for further Democratic gains among professionals than among white working-class voters, especially men, who remain extremely receptive to Republican appeals on taxes, cultural issues and national strength. At best, the authors suggest, Democrats in the near future may manage only "a reasonable level of white working-class support."</p>
<p>
All this points toward a future that continues the trends of the recent past, in which the electorate aligns more along cultural than economic lines. That conclusion is reinforced by the book's most original contribution: its documentation of the growing Democratic strength in the metropolitan areas that have progressed most in the transition from manufacturing to the production of ideas and services, areas the authors call "ideopolises." In these "postindustrial metropolitan areas," where the high-tech and service economies are strong, the population is diverse (typically with large immigrant and gay constituencies) and tolerance on social issues is the dominant ethos, Democrats are thriving. The eclectic mix seems to create an environment conducive to Democratic messages, even for those ordinarily resistant: One of the book's most compelling findings is that even white working-class voters who live in ideopolis counties tend to vote more heavily Democratic than those who don't. Looking at counties with the most high-tech economic activity or a major research university, the authors conclude that almost all of the Democratic gains in presidential voting since 1980 have come in the ideopolis counties. In 2000, Gore and Ralph Nader combined won close to 58 percent of the vote in these burgeoning communities.</p>
<p>
Over time, the authors project, these places will continue to grow and to strengthen Democrats. There's clearly evidence to support that prediction. At the local and state level, Republicans have nominated candidates who can appeal in these areas. But given the strength of the GOP's socially conservative base, it will be difficult in the foreseeable future for any candidate to win the Republican presidential nomination while sharing the liberal views on social issues dominant in these communities, such as abortion and gun control. The numbers may wax and wane in any individual election, but the long-term trend toward the Democrats in these future-oriented counties seems likely to endure provided that the party remains relatively centrist in its views on the economy and social issues such as crime and welfare.</p>
<p>
<span class="dropcap">T</span>hat's a big if, though. The problem with political prophecy as a genre is that parties adapt and change, sometimes in unpredictable ways. The GOP presidential majority seemed so solid 15 years ago that analysts spoke confidently of a Republican lock on the Electoral College. But Clinton picked the lock by moderating the Democrats' message and image, and by capitalizing on the failures of George Bush Senior. Something similar could happen to the lasting Democratic majority Judis and Teixeira foresee -- even before it emerges. Democrats could repel some of the postindustrial voters attracted to them on social issues if they revert toward big-spending liberalism. (Though the authors don't consider the possibility, such a perception may well have hurt Gore in 2000.) Republicans could make enough progress in appealing to Hispanic voters, especially on cultural and national-defense issues, to hold the electoral votes from the Southwest states where their support among whites remain solid. The future may not progress in a straight line from the present.</p>
<p>
And before Democrats pop the champagne, it's worth remembering that, even while dominating in the ideopolis counties, Gore still lost the White House. Relative to Clinton in 1996, Gore's biggest losses came at the fringes of the urban core: in agricultural and small-town communities and in the exurban counties on the crabgrass frontier, where the countryside and the most distant suburbs meet. Here the Democratic vote collapsed largely on cultural grounds: support for guns, antipathy toward abortion and the backlash against Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky. The decline in rural America cost Gore key battlegrounds such Ohio and Missouri, which Clinton carried in 1996, and nearly pushed Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota into the GOP column as well. If Republicans maintain their solid hold on the South -- the one region where the authors see little evidence that even ideopolis voters are warming to Democrats -- the party is unlikely to establish a reliable majority in presidential politics. The one way to work around the southern problem would be if the party could attract more exurban and small-town votes from the red counties, especially across the big battlegrounds in the Midwest.</p>
<p>
The problem is even more acute in the Senate, where the small and rural states that Bush dominated exert a disproportionate influence. Gore may have won more votes, but Bush won more states (30 in all). That means to maintain, much less expand, a Senate majority, Democrats need to demonstrate that they can survive in the red states at a time when cultural allegiances are looming more heavily over voters' choices.</p>
<p>
This year's battle for control of the Senate underscores the party's challenge. Raw numbers favor the Democrats: The Republicans are defending 20 seats in November; the Democrats 14. But just three of those Republicans are running in blue states that Gore carried; fully half of the Democrats are competing in red states that voted for Bush. The disparity is even wider when the lens is narrowed to the most competitive races. Of the 11 races the two sides generally consider most competitive, only two are being fought in states Gore carried: New Jersey, where former Sen. Frank Lautenberg is trying to hold the seat Robert Torricelli was forced to vacate, and Minnesota, where Paul Wellstone is trying to fend off former St. Paul Mayor Norm Coleman. The other nine most closely watched races -- featuring Republican incumbents in Colorado and Arkansas, Democratic incumbents in Missouri and South Dakota, and Republican-held open seats in New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas and Tennessee -- are in states that Bush carried. Republicans hold more distant hopes of ousting Democratic incumbents in two other Bush states, Georgia and Louisiana, and a third, Iowa, that Gore barely held in 2000.</p>
<p>
It's not an exaggeration to say that, ideopolises notwithstanding, the single most critical factor in determining which party will control the Senate next year is whether midwestern Democrats can regain some of the ground Gore lost with small-town and exurban voters. With takeover opportunities for both sides dwindling, Senate control could come down to whether the Democratic incumbents in South Dakota (Tim Johnson), Missouri (Jean Carnahan) and Minnesota (Wellstone) can hold their seats in an environment where the national-security issues that work well for Republicans with rural and exurban voters are rising in prominence. In each state, the Republican candidate is working hard to portray the Democrat as soft on defense, using arguments and language that really haven't been part of the political debate since the fall of the Berlin Wall.</p>
<p>
Judis and Teixeira argue that defense issues will recede again when the fear of terrorism grows less acute. I'm not so sure: Unlike, say, the Gulf War, which had a clear endpoint, terrorism is a more open-ended threat that may influence voters for years. But even if the defense issue diminishes, the odds are high that Republicans will find ways to highlight other issues that strengthen their ties to voters on the conservative and traditionalist side of America's cultural divides, even as Democrats solidify their position in the more cosmopolitan states. </p>
<p>
All of which points to more time in the trenches for the two parties. Democrats are in a much stronger position to compete for the White House than they were 15 years ago, and the changes that Judis and Teixeira describe could well strengthen the party's position even more over the next 15 years. But the country is so profoundly and evenly divided over the continuing changes in American society -- more racial diversity, fewer traditional families -- that it may be difficult for either party to establish a lasting (much less decisive) electoral advantage in the years ahead. So long as each party has so little success finding new ways to attract voters culturally attuned to the other party, the balance of power in Washington will remain precarious. Demographic change, as the authors project, may eventually deliver Democrats from that deadlock. In the meantime, both parties are likely to remain frustrated by an electorate that denies them enough of a mandate to impose their agenda on the other.</p>
<p><i>Ronald Brownstein is a national political correspondent and columnist for the </i>Los Angeles Times<i>.</i></p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 28 Oct 2002 18:13:49 +0000142840 at https://prospect.orgRonald BrownsteinThe New Politics of Immigrationhttps://prospect.org/article/new-politics-immigration
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div>Tue, 26 Mar 2002 20:25:50 +0000139534 at https://prospect.orgRonald BrownsteinState of the Debate:https://prospect.org/article/state-debate
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><blockquote><p>
<b>The Truth of Power: Intellectual Affairs in the Clinton White<br />
House</b> By Benjamin R. Barber. W.W. Norton and Company, 320 pages, $26.95 </p>
<p>
<b>The Best of Times: America in the Clinton Years</b> By Haynes Johnson. Harcourt,<br />
610 pages, $27.00 </p>
<p>
<b>From the Center to the Edge: The Politics and Policies of the Clinton<br />
Presidency</b> By William C. Berman. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 141 pages,<br />
$16.95</p>
<p>
<b>Political Fictions</b> By Joan Didion. Alfred A. Knopf, 338 pages, $25.00<br /></p></blockquote>
<p>
<span class="dropcap">I</span>n Washington, conservatives still roam the Capitol trying to name airports,<br />
post offices, and federal buildings for Ronald Reagan. But Democrats seem<br />
entirely unsure about what to make of their only recent two-term president, Bill<br />
Clinton. In 2000, Al Gore thought Clinton more of an albatross than an asset and<br />
became so spooked by the administration's odor of scandal that he also ran away<br />
from its record of peace and prosperity. In a January speech critiquing President<br />
George W. Bush's management of the economy, Senate majority leader Tom Daschle<br />
praised the economic strategy of Clinton's two terms and even sat Robert Rubin,<br />
Clinton's treasury secretary, on the podium to underscore the point. But he never<br />
mentioned Clinton by name. Meanwhile, Clinton, whose tendency toward self-pity is<br />
his least attractive quality, has been reported to be in his Harlem aerie<br />
characteristically brooding over whether history is shortchanging his<br />
accomplishments.</p>
<p>
He's likely to find only limited solace in four new books that begin the<br />
process of framing his legacy. All approach Clinton from a largely sympathetic<br />
center to center-left perspective. Yet all find him wanting. In part, that<br />
judgment reflects an understandable conclusion that Clinton's faults confounded<br />
his talents and produced a record stained by too many missed opportunities and<br />
self-inflicted wounds (in which category the Monica Lewinsky affair would qualify<br />
as a shotgun to the head). But these conclusions also reflect a reluctance,<br />
especially on the left, to recognize the extent of Clinton's political and policy<br />
achievements in a difficult political environment. </p>
<p>
Each of these books offers insights into the man and the political passions<br />
that swirled around him during the 1990s. But all slight his most positive<br />
legacy: an economic expansion that spread more benefits to more families than any<br />
since the 1960s. Lower- and middle-income families gained more ground under<br />
Clinton than under any president since Lyndon Johnson, and those gains were<br />
accelerated by government policies designed both to encourage and to reward work.<br />
That fact doesn't fit the story line either of conservative critics, who want to<br />
portray a frivolous presidency that left behind only scandal, or of liberal<br />
skeptics, who see in Clinton a poll-driven opportunist who abandoned traditional<br />
Democratic priorities for a cynical centrism. </p>
<p>
In fact, the evidence of the 1990s suggests that Clinton synthesized an<br />
approach to expanding opportunity that was both effective and politically<br />
popular: He simultaneously reduced poverty and increased the party's reach among<br />
upper-income voters. By linking opportunity to responsibility--by demanding work<br />
in welfare reform, but then insisting that government had an obligation to "make<br />
work pay"--he provided Democrats a politically sustainable model for broadening<br />
the benefits of prosperity. His tenure saw many missed opportunities; but his<br />
systematic efforts to reward work, encourage investment in troubled<br />
neighborhoods, expand home ownership, and tilt the burden of taxes from average<br />
families to the affluent displayed a coherent and consistent priority on seizing<br />
the opportunity that good times provided to improve ordinary lives. It's a legacy<br />
that Democrats may fully appreciate only as the government moves on to different<br />
priorities.</p>
<p>
<span class="dropcap">B</span>ill Clinton may be so difficult to bring into focus because so<br />
many things about him were contradictory. He reshaped the Democratic agenda to<br />
reconnect it with mainstream values and then flouted those values himself by his<br />
dalliance with Lewinsky. He restored the Democrats' capacity to compete for the<br />
presidency (in the three campaigns immediately before Clinton, the Democratic<br />
presidential nominees won a smaller share of the available electoral votes than<br />
in any three-election sequence since the formation of the modern party system<br />
with Andrew Jackson in 1828); then he lost control of the House and Senate in the<br />
1994 Republican landslide. He recovered to beat back the Newt Gingrich revolution<br />
and then suffered the ignominy of impeachment. His policy achievements carried<br />
Gore to the brink of the presidency in 2000, but his personal failures may have<br />
been just enough to allow Bush to win on a promise to restore honor to the White<br />
House. Clinton was creator and destroyer.</p>
<p>
Of the four authors considered here, political scientist Benjamin R. Barber<br />
best captures all of these personal and political ambiguities. Barber, who came<br />
to know Clinton through a series of dinners the White House convened with<br />
"big-think intellectuals," aptly compares him to Walt Whitman in his bottomless,<br />
sometimes debilitating desire to transcend all divisions, political and personal:<br />
"He was many, embracing the North and the South, the East and the West. And<br />
almost making it work." </p>
<p>
Barber's book suffers from a restricted angle of vision. Almost all of his<br />
meaningful interactions with Clinton came at these yearly dinners where Clinton<br />
mingled with assorted academics--ostensibly to kick around themes for the State<br />
of the Union, but mostly because it seemed to satisfy the president's endless<br />
capacity for political discussion both abstract and concrete. (Others would<br />
flag--like Tipper Gore, who once lightly dozed off on Barber's shoulder--but<br />
Clinton kept talking, often brilliantly, when even the professors were ready to<br />
surface for air.) </p>
<p>
But Barber compensates with generally astute political judgments and an acute<br />
personal portrayal of Clinton. He captures Clinton's all-purpose insatiability<br />
with a deft account of sharing a bowl of cashews with the president at one of the<br />
big-think dinners: "Talk about a common touch," Barber writes. "He would look out<br />
across the table, exchange words with someone down at the other end, but leave<br />
some sixth sense on guard, a third eye marking my hand in motion and parrying my<br />
every thrust with a quicker move of his own. If I got three cashews over ten<br />
minutes, that was a lot." Later, Barber tellingly observes: "Too many people felt<br />
close to the president for it to be true."</p>
<p>
He's just as sharp in many of his political conclusions. Barber places<br />
himself to Clinton's left but recognizes the necessity of Clinton's efforts to<br />
reclaim the center: "The poor could not be served by a party of the minorities<br />
that became a permanent minority party," he writes. While Clinton might not have<br />
achieved as much as liberals hoped, Barber notes, he also stymied Gingrich's<br />
drive to roll back the Great Society and even the New Deal. Barber has a point:<br />
Clinton's success in making a case for Washington's role can be measured in the<br />
distance between Gingrich's dream of radically retrenching government and Bush's<br />
more modest hopes of constraining it. </p>
<p>
In <i>The Best of Times,</i> Haynes Johnson, the former <i>Washington Post</i><br />
reporter, offers a similarly mixed assessment of Clinton's impact. Johnson's<br />
book covers more than Clinton: It's a panoramic, sometimes familiar, but almost<br />
always engaging account of politics, business (what he calls technotimes), and<br />
culture (teletimes) in the 1990s. The book's heart is an extended, extremely<br />
well-written recounting of the Clinton impeachment saga. Johnson offers no<br />
"news," no insider revelations from the White House or Special Prosecutor Ken<br />
Starr's office. But he has produced something valuable: keen portraits of the key<br />
players and a shrewd understanding of the decades-long cultural conflicts that<br />
the impeachment saga crystallized. Johnson is an able guide for future historians<br />
through this sorry story: Without ever condoning Clinton's behavior, he captures<br />
the rabid ferocity of his opponents. It's impossible to read his devastating<br />
portrayals of Linda Tripp and Lucianne Goldberg and not think of Shakespeare's<br />
witches, stirring the cauldron with the bile of their own disappointments.</p>
<p>
Johnson has less to say about the policy record of Clinton's eight years. But<br />
his bottom line is similar to Barber's, though a bit less sympathetic. Mostly<br />
because of the Lewinsky scandal, he sees Clinton as squandering "a time of<br />
unparalleled peace and prosperity when a second-term president had a rare<br />
historical opportunity to provide significant long-term leadership." </p>
<p>
That's roughly the appraisal University of Toronto emeritus history professor<br />
William C. Berman gives, too, in his slim and superficial account of Clinton's<br />
presidency, <i>From the Center to the Edge.</i> Berman's book is little more than<br />
a recapitulation of old headlines; it reads like a CliffsNotes guide to the<br />
Clinton era. Compounding the problem, Berman can never quite fix his perspective<br />
on Clinton. He seems sympathetic to those who believe that Clinton surrendered<br />
too much of the Democrats' traditional agenda. But he acknowledges that the<br />
president advanced several venerable Democratic priorities (such as protecting<br />
the environment and the rights of minorities) in an adverse political climate and<br />
punctured Gingrich's dream of fundamentally shrinking government. </p>
<p>
In <i>Political Fictions,</i> a collection of her political journalism from<br /><i>The New York Review of Books,</i> Joan Didion won't give Clinton even<br />
that much. Didion is often bitingly insightful about Clinton's enemies, like Newt<br />
Gingrich and Ken Starr. Her criticism of the media's performance--particularly in<br />
the frenzy that surrounded the Lewinsky scandal--is devastatingly precise. But<br />
her Clinton is a cartoon character.</p>
<p>
To Didion, Clinton represents the triumph of focus groups and the culmination<br />
of what she terms "the determination of the Democratic Party to shed any<br />
association with its traditional low-income base." Guided by polls, fueled by big<br />
money, and fortified by the machinations of the Democratic Leadership Council<br />
(DLC), Clinton was obsessed with "phantom Reagan Democrats," in her view, and was<br />
edging near racism in his appeals to "the forgotten middle class."</p>
<p>
<span class="dropcap">T</span>he contradictions of Clinton's presidency provide evidence for<br />
and against almost all of these criticisms. (Though not all should be taken<br />
seriously: To consider appeals to the middle class a cover for racism is<br />
lunatic.) Did Clinton rely heavily on polls and focus groups? Yes--though he was<br />
more willing to confront them than Didion suggests. Surely, no poll advised<br />
Clinton that it would be popular to raise taxes in his 1993 deficit-reduction<br />
plan. Did impeachment diminish Clinton's accomplishments in his final term?<br />
Unquestionably--though even before Lewinsky, the conservative backlash against<br />
the 1997 balanced-budget deal was already discouraging the Republican Congress<br />
from making deals with a president their base supporters considered<br />
illegitimate. Did Clinton sometimes vacillate and change course?<br />
Absolutely--though he often arrived at an effective destination, as he did in<br />
sanctioning, after much hesitation, the bombing campaigns in Bosnia and Kosovo.<br />
After the events of September 11, which occurred too late to be considered in any<br />
of these books, Clinton will undoubtedly face comparably pointed questions from<br />
historians about his record in preparing America to resist and combat terrorism.</p>
<p>
Yet the most common complaint against Clinton in these books is the least<br />
valid: the contention that his "New Democrat" agenda abandoned the poor and the<br />
working-class and thus steered the Democratic Party away from its historic<br />
mission of expanding opportunity. Didion phrases this indictment in its most<br />
simplistic formulation, deriding Clinton's call for policies that reward work as<br />
"silly." She suggests that the agenda he rode to the White House in 1992 could be<br />
read as "based on transferring entitlements from what were called 'special<br />
interests' to those who 'work hard and play by the rules,' in other words<br />
distributing what wealth there was among the voting percentage of the<br />
population." But Johnson, a more serious critic, also concludes that "the boom<br />
[of the Clinton years] was leaving the poor farther behind economically." Berman<br />
accuses Clinton of a "cautious centrism" on the problems of the poor. Even<br />
Barber, the most sympathetic of the four, wonders why African-Americans supported<br />
Clinton so ardently when he "did not necessarily deliver the goods" for them.</p>
<p>
Maybe the answer is because he <i>did</i> deliver the goods, though in ways<br />
different from those that Democrats have traditionally used. The deep instinct of<br />
liberals to believe that Clinton's success at expanding the party's electoral<br />
coalition was won solely at the price of sacrificing its neediest constituents<br />
can be sustained only by ignoring the actual record of the 1990s. Under Clinton,<br />
low-income and working-class families made their biggest gains since the<br />
1960s--largely because of the booming economy, but also because of the policies<br />
Didion derides as "silly": a set of initiatives that encouraged and rewarded<br />
work. It turned out that "making work pay" was not only a good political slogan<br />
but an effective strategy.</p>
<p>
The 1990s were unquestionably a good time for Americans in the penthouses. Yet<br />
the boom of the Clinton years was defined not only by its length but also by its<br />
breadth and depth; it reached even workers on the margins of the economy,<br />
minorities, single mothers, and people with limited education. Census Bureau<br />
statistics paint a portrait of the decade recognizable in none of these books. </p>
<p>
Consider the median income. Overall, in real terms, the median income--the<br />
income level achieved by half of American families--increased by almost 15<br />
percent from 1993 to 2000. But it rose much faster for blacks (33 percent) and<br />
Hispanics (24 percent) than it did for whites (14 percent). It rose faster in<br />
central cities (18.5 percent) than it did in suburbs (12 percent). Despite all<br />
the warnings about welfare reform impoverishing single mothers, the median income<br />
for female householders jumped nearly 29 percent from 1993 to 2001, significantly<br />
more than the 17 percent increase for married couples.</p>
<p>
In percentage terms, families on the lowest rung of the income ladder scored<br />
the biggest income gains from 1993 through 1999. According to Economic Policy<br />
Institute calculations, families in the bottom fifth of the income distribution<br />
saw their average income increase nearly 19 percent from 1993 through 1999--while<br />
families in the top 5 percent enjoyed an average increase of about 15 percent.<br />
By comparison, in the expansion of the 1980s, the average income of the top 5<br />
percent grew more than five times faster than the incomes of the bottom 20<br />
percent.</p>
<p>
Those broadly shared income gains refute another common liberal complaint<br />
about the Clinton years: that the expansion of the 1990s widened the gap between<br />
rich and poor. Actually, according to Census Bureau figures, the gap between rich<br />
and poor remained virtually unchanged through the decade. In 1993, the top fifth<br />
of households received 48.9 percent of all income; in 2000, the number had<br />
increased only slightly, to 49.6 percent. (The top fifth increased their share of<br />
total income much more rapidly in the 1980s.) The share of total income received<br />
by the bottom three-fifths of families declined during Clinton's tenure, but<br />
only slightly (from 27.7 percent to 27.3 percent). It's perhaps a legitimate<br />
complaint that the Clinton years didn't see more progress at <i>narrowing</i><br />
income inequality. But given the enormous gains of families at the top during the<br />
1990s, even holding inequality essentially stable has to be seen as a kind of<br />
triumph, for it required significant advances for workers on the economy's lower<br />
rungs as well.</p>
<p>
And those gains generated dramatic and almost entirely overlooked advances in<br />
reducing poverty. From 1993 through 2000, the poverty rate in America fell from<br />
15.1 percent to 11.3 percent--a reduction of 25 percent, the biggest eight-year<br />
decline since the 1960s. As with income, the most vulnerable groups recorded the<br />
biggest gains. The poverty rate among blacks dropped by fully a third under<br />
Clinton; among Hispanics, the drop was just over 30 percent. For both groups, the<br />
poverty rate is now the lowest ever recorded. Poverty dropped faster for<br />
female-headed households than it did for married couples and is now, by far, at<br />
the lowest level ever recorded. Children registered the greatest gains of all.<br />
Under Clinton, poverty among children fell by nearly 30 percent, to the lowest<br />
level since 1978. During Clinton's tenure, the number of children in poverty fell<br />
by 4.1 million--compared with just 50,000 during the expansion under Ronald<br />
Reagan. Meanwhile, home ownership among African-Americans and Latinos rose to the<br />
highest levels ever recorded.</p>
<p>
<span class="dropcap">O</span>bviously, the long boom itself (in particular, the low<br />
unemployment rates) deserves the most credit for these advances. But even leaving<br />
aside the question of how much Clinton's success in deficit reduction contributed<br />
to the expansion, his administration pursued a coherent series of initiatives<br />
that reinforced these trends by demanding and honoring work. The stick was<br />
welfare reform, which pushed welfare recipients into the job market, where they<br />
could benefit from the rising tide. The carrot was a steady stream of policies to<br />
reward work, beginning with a major increase in the Earned Income Tax Credit<br />
(EITC) and then continuing with a hike in the minimum wage, the creation of the<br />
children's health-insurance program (to provide coverage for the children of<br />
working poor families), extended access to Medicaid for former welfare<br />
recipients, an increase in day-care subsidies and funding for after-school<br />
programs (which provide another source of child care for working families), and a<br />
children's tax credit that significantly reduced the tax burden on many<br />
working-class families. On a separate track, much tougher enforcement of<br />
fair-lending laws and federal subsidies for community lending institutions<br />
contributed to a staggering 97 percent increase in home mortgage loans to<br />
low-income borrowers from 1993 to 1999. The four authors contemplating Clinton<br />
give, at most, short shrift to all of these accomplishments. </p>
<p>
But taken together, these efforts tangibly improved millions of lives and<br />
took a significant further bite out of poverty. Under Clinton, the federal tax<br />
burden on families at the median income and below fell markedly. (At the same<br />
time, the 47 percent share of total federal taxes paid by families earning<br />
$100,000 or more jumped to 57 percent--a statistic that doesn't exactly confirm<br />
Didion's portrayal of the Clinton administration as a DLC-inspired surrender to<br />
the wealthy.) Harvard professor David T. Ellwood, a former Clinton welfare<br />
official, recently calculated that a single mother who left welfare for full-time<br />
minimum-wage work would have come out ahead by only $2,005 in 1986; by 1997,<br />
largely because of the expansion of the EITC, work was some $7,100 more valuable<br />
than welfare. That support for work lifted millions of additional families out of<br />
poverty under Clinton. Once the EITC and other government income supports (such<br />
as food stamps) are added in and state and federal taxes paid are subtracted,<br />
the poverty rate in 2000 stood at just 8.7 percent overall and only 11.1 percent<br />
among children, the Census Bureau found.</p>
<p>
It's possible to argue that those numbers are still too high in an affluent<br />
society. Or that even those who have escaped poverty still haven't progressed far<br />
enough toward the middle class. Or that Clinton did not increase assistance to<br />
the working poor enough. (The failure to improve health-care security for adults<br />
may stand as his greatest policy failure.) But to ignore the real gains of the<br />
1990s, as these books largely do, is to miss the most important political and<br />
policy achievements of the Clinton years.</p>
<p>
During his two terms, Clinton demonstrated that it was possible for Democrats<br />
to deliver for families struggling on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder<br />
without alienating those above them. He did that by grounding his domestic<br />
policies not in the class warfare that Didion pines for but in values that share<br />
broad support across society: fiscal discipline, expanding opportunity, and<br />
demanding personal responsibility. Clinton's failure to behave responsibly in his<br />
personal life will forever cloud these achievements and diminish his place in<br />
history. But it's unlikely that Democrats will regain the White House without<br />
recognizing and building on his success at constructing an agenda that expanded<br />
both opportunity and the party's fragile electoral coalition.</p>
<p></p></div></div></div>Wed, 06 Feb 2002 19:04:46 +0000142460 at https://prospect.orgRonald BrownsteinMore Liberal Than You Thoughthttps://prospect.org/article/more-liberal-you-thought
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p> </p>
<p><font style="nonprinting">Bill Bradley wants to require the registration of all handguns. Al Gore says that all handgun owners should be required to obtain a license. Bradley wants to prohibit police departments from using "racial profiling." So does Gore. Gore wants to raise the minimum wage. So does Bradley. Both men talk about making it easier for labor unions to organize. Bradley says day care should be more widely available; Gore has pledged to fund universal access to preschool. Gore wants to expand the children's health insurance program to cover more children and as many as seven million work ing parents now without health insurance. Bradley's first detailed proposal was for near-universal coverage. </font></p>
<p><font style="nonprinting">Both campaigns strenuously deny it, but something that looks very much like a bidding war for the hearts of hard-core Democratic activists is breaking out as Gore and Bradley engage in an unexpectedly tight battle for the party's presidential nomination. Given that both men gravitated toward the center during their careers in Congress, some Demo crats have a hard time imagining these two spiraling each other toward the left. "For one basically moderate individual to push another moderate individual to be more progressive is a leap I find somewhat difficult," says Amy Isaacs, national director of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). Yet, within limits, that's exactly what appears to be happening. </font></p>
<p><font style="nonprinting">Bradley is talking about racial reconciliation, campaign finance reform, his opposition to the 1996 welfare bill, adding gays as a protected group under the 1964 civil rights act, and new offensives to reduce childhood poverty and expand access to health care. Gore is pursuing a more nuanced balance. He's still pushing plenty of centrist "New Democrat" ideas difficult for the left to swallow. But in a series of largely overlooked speeches since last spring, the vice president has proposed a more assertive role for the federal government- in areas from education to health care- than President Clinton has risked offering at any point since the Republican congressional take-over in 1994. </font></p>
<p><font style="nonprinting">Gore's wish list reflects his own substantive analysis of how to build on the policy successes- and confront the failures- that he and Clinton have experienced over the past seven years. But embedded in his agenda is an intriguing political dynamic. The usual rule in presidential politics- laid down by no less an authority than Richard M. Nixon- is that candidates play to their party's base in the primary and lean back to the center in the general election. That would suggest Gore or even Bradley might spend much of this fall talking about more government initiatives, and much of next fall trying to forget what he said this fall. In this election, though, the incentives look very different. With Republican front-runner George W. Bush trying to claim the center, the need to create contrasts may impel the Democratic nominee to emphasize activist government in the general election as well as the primaries. For Bradley or Gore, the challenge will be gauging how far to go without opening the door to Republican counterattacks about big government that Clinton has largely nailed shut since embracing a balanced budget himself in 1995. </font></p>
<p> </p>
<p><font style="nonprinting"><font color="darkred"><b>A Liberal Center</b></font> </font></p>
<p><font style="nonprinting">In this early maneuvering, there's no sign of Gore abandoning the basic framework of Clinton's New Democrat synthesis. The vice president has already committed himself to a considerable list of centrist priorities, particularly on fiscal and cultural issues. He's pledged to keep the federal budget in balance every year he's president. Unequivocally he insists he will maintain the work requirements and time limits on aid included in the 1996 welfare bill. He wants to make it easier for religiously based charities to deliver government services, like job training and drug counseling. He wants states to require teachers to undergo peer reviews to maintain their teaching licenses. He's promised to push for a victims' bill of rights, and he wants Washington to help cities hire another 50,000 new police officers. None of that sends hearts beating much faster at the ADA. </font></p>
<p><font style="nonprinting">But Clintonism has always involved balancing such centrist ideas with more traditionally Democratic notions of activist government. And Gore is confronting electoral pressures greater than Clinton ever faced to pump up the activist side of his equation. The most immediate source of pressure is the surprisingly robust primary challenge from Bradley, the former New Jersey senator. Clinton never really had to defend his agenda against a serious primary challenge from the left: Mario M. Cuomo didn't run against him in 1992 (leaving only Tom Harkin and later Jerry Brown to feebly carry the flag), and Jesse Jackson didn't challenge him in 1996. That left Clinton largely free to emphasize the centrist elements of his blend. Bradley, though, is running at Gore primarily from the left- accusing the Clinton administration of lacking "big ideas" and insisting that prosperity's benefits must be spread more widely. Bradley is putting his name on a lengthening list of liberal social and economic priorities. He wants to let gays serve openly in the military, he's indicated support for allowing unions to organize through card checks, he's criticized the work requirements and time limits in the 1996 welfare reform proposal, and he's offered a sweeping campaign finance reform proposal. In late September, he proposed to spend $65 billion a year from the surplus to subsidize health insurance for all uncovered children and millions of uninsured adults. More proposals on bolstering working families and reducing child poverty are due soon. </font></p>
<p><font style="nonprinting">Ironically, Bradley's message doesn't seem to be resonating yet nearly as much as his loping, antipolitics (and implied anti-Clinton) persona; in many surveys, Bradley is running better among independents and moderate-to-conservative Democrats (many of them disillusioned with Clinton) than he is with liberals. But Bradley's critique has forced Gore to take notice. Moreover, if Pat Buchanan runs as an eco nomic nationalist, that adds pressure on Gore (and Bradley) not to take for granted downscale voters who are sometime Democrats. </font></p>
<p><font style="nonprinting">From top to bottom, Gore advisers insist they are devising their agenda with an eye toward the general election and that they feel no pressure to match Bradley's ideas. Yet privately some will acknowledge that even if they do not feel compelled to trump every specific idea Bradley offers (a list, in any case, he didn't even begin to fill out until early fall), Gore has felt pressure to rebut the broader critique from Bradley and others that his would be a status quo campaign lacking in new ideas or grand ambitions. That pressure has been a subtle but steady goad encouraging Gore to increase the scale of his proposals in areas such as expanding access to health care or reforming education. </font></p>
<p> </p>
<p><font style="nonprinting">What's unusual is that Bush is pushing Gore in the same direction. While making some concessions of his own toward his party base (promising to sign the GOP tax cut, for instance, or pushing to partially privatize Social Security), Bush is following the Clinton model of emphasizing the center even in the primary. Ignoring steady potshots from the right, he's grounded his campaign in the slogans of "com passionate conservatism" and "prosperity with a purpose." He's downplayed social issues like abortion and affirmative action. His first major speech offered $8 billion in new federal spending to assist private charities in making greater efforts to help the poor; his second focused on reforming Head Start and Title I, the two principal federal education initiatives aimed at the poor. He's even signed onto some modest gun control initiatives, like raising the age for handgun ownership. </font></p>
<p><font style="nonprinting">In all these ways, Bush is signaling that if he wins the nomination, he could compete more effectively for centrist swing voters than his father did in 1992 or Bob Dole did in 1996. For both Bradley and Gore, one of the overriding necessities if they face Bush next fall will be to undermine that appeal by dislodging Bush from the center. One way they'll try to do that is by tying him to the Republican leadership in Congress; another will be by highlighting his Texas record on such issues as guns and pollution, where he took positions that didn't look out of the mainstream in the state but might nationally. </font></p>
<p><font style="nonprinting">But Gore strategists believe the key to challenging Bush's claim to the center is articulating an activist federal agenda he can't match. "Our challenge becomes not to let him get away with a couple of symbolic separations and a little bit of window-dressing policy that belies the fact that he does not intend to take any real action," insists one senior Gore adviser. Many around Gore en vision a general election in which the vice president (should he get that far) tries to under mine Bush's positioning with arguments like this: "My opponent may say he's compassionate, but he won't raise the minimum wage or help cities rebuild crumbling schools or help working families get the health care they need." The only way Gore can draw those contrasts is by stockpiling initiatives of his own that Bush can't endorse. In that way, the pressure to outflank Bush pushes Gore in the same direction as does the pressure to preempt Bradley. The political demands in both instances argue for a Gore agenda that is ambitious, specific, and focused on the areas that his rivals are emphasizing- the same areas of highest priority to core Democrats: education, health care, and poverty. </font></p>
<p><font style="nonprinting">"Both will require Gore to become more activist," says one senior Clinton administration official close to Gore. "The liberal challenge in the primary and the Republican in the general both require the same movement- both will require Gore to make his activist, progressive case. Both arrows point in the same direction." </font></p>
<p> </p>
<p><font style="nonprinting"><font color="darkred"><b>Clinton and Beyond</b></font> </font></p>
<p><font style="nonprinting">Gore is building on Clinton's own recent shift in direction. In 1992 candidate Clinton's New Democrat promises to "end welfare as we know it," shrink the federal work force, and halve the federal deficit were balanced by activist pledges to increase public investment, reform education, and ensure universal health care. After those aims disastrously collided during his chaotic first two years- fueling the Republican landslide in 1994- Clinton was forced to retrench. After embracing the balanced budget in 1995, he ran for re-election on a minimalist agenda centered on defending existing programs like Medicare and Medicaid. </font></p>
<p><font style="nonprinting">Since then, though, as the political and fiscal climates have improved, Clinton has steadily raised his sights, albeit with limited legislative success. In 1997 he proposed voluntary national education tests (which Republicans blocked) and the children's health insurance program (which he won in the balanced-budget deal). During the next year came proposals to raise the minimum wage, establish a patients' bill of rights, hire 100,000 teachers, subsidize child care, and allow the near-elderly to buy into Medicare. This year, Clinton resubmitted all those ideas (most of which Republicans had shelved in 1998) and added a call for covering prescription drugs under Medicare, hiring 50,000 new police officers, and offering "new market" incentives for invest ments in depressed urban and rural communities. That might not add up to the Great Society, but it's a formidable distance from where Clinton stood only three years ago. </font></p>
<p><font style="nonprinting">Now on almost every front, Gore has proposed to push further. Endorsing virtually all of those Clinton proposals as a base line, he's released a swarm of his own new ideas- at least two dozen in all. In education he's called for the federal government to fund universal access to preschool, class- size reduction all the way through 12<sup>th</sup> grade (Clinton's 100,000-teacher plan would only reach through third grade), expanded summer-school and after-school programs, a teachers' corps that would help young people pay for college in return for teaching in distressed school districts, and a 401(j) program- modeled on the popular pension plan- that workers could use to save for their children's education and training or for their own. </font></p>
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<table align="right" bgcolor="#EFEFEF" border="1" cellpadding="10" cellspacing="0" hspace="5" vspace="5" width="200"><tbody><tr><td><center><font style="nonprinting"><font size="4">BUDGET BUSTERS</font> </font><br /><hr size="1" width="90%" /></center>
<p><font style="nonprinting">Despite the surprising activism of both Gore and Bradley, under current budget rules and politics, there is no room for launching major government initiatives that require significant spending. Three factors suppress spending. One is the unwillingness of any political party or faction to consider higher taxes even on the newly megarich- the fear of the tax-and-spend label present since the Reagan era. </font></p>
<p><font style="nonprinting">A second factor is the bipartisan agreement to not spend the part of the overall surplus that corresponds to the annual increment in the Social Security trust-fund surplus. Rather, trust-fund surpluses are used to pay down the general government debt, presumably to ease the burden of the baby boomers' retirement. This lock-box policy is not really about saving Social Security: it's the result of political posturing to be the savior of Social Security, the failure to address the long-term growth of health care costs (a real threat to public, household, and employer budgets), and a continuing belief that increasing saving is the path to growth. </font></p>
<p><font style="nonprinting">But what about the non- Social Security budget surplus projected to be $997 billion over the next 10 years? This is where the third factor, the 1997 budget agreement, kicks in. To reduce the deficit, both parties agreed to put strict limits (called "caps") on domestic discretionary spending (of which defense spending comprises nearly half). These caps have just now started to bite. They will be observed, budget forecasters assume, when surpluses are estimated. To observe the caps requires nondefense domestic spending cuts in 2009 of 13 percent (the Clinton plan) or 29 percent (if we add tax cuts as the GOP proposes). So the flip side of the non- Social Security surplus is spending cuts that are neither politically feasible nor desirable. </font></p>
<p><font style="nonprinting">The difficulty in making these cuts is proven by the inability of the Republican Congress to do so, as reflected in their farcical gimmickry: counting constitutionally mandated census expenses as "emergency" spending, moving outlays a year ahead or behind, even adding a "13th month" to the fiscal year. The very latest move, stretching out the Earned Income Tax Credit payments to the working poor over a longer time period, has been soundly, and rightly, condemned by George W. Bush as "balancing the budget on the backs of the poor." More antics will surely follow because even maintaining current spending levels will not allow the expansion of programs corresponding to a larger economy and a greater population. </font></p>
<p><font style="nonprinting">This is the box that Democrats, notably Gore and Bradley, need to break out of if they are to make new initiatives. There's certainly a backlog of unmet needs to be addressed after two decades of fiscal austerity. In 1998 economist Dean Baker estimated the shortfall in public investment needs (school and highway infrastructure, education and training, research and development) to be $66 to $95 billion. Add Bradley's health plan of $65 billion (or any effort to fund Medicare, to provide prescription drug coverage in Medicare, or extend coverage to all kids, let alone everyone), and we're talking about real money. Plus there's needed social spending on housing, nutrition, crime prevention, and other areas. </font></p>
<p><font style="nonprinting">Something, or several things, will have to give. We can't limit revenues, lock up the Social Security surplus, increase defense spending, maintain the budget caps, and pretend we're going to launch much needed new initiatives. Will either Gore or Bradley have the courage to admit that we are in a new fiscal era and put tax increases or mild public borrowing back on the agenda? If not, we're condemned to a politics of tokenism. </font></p>
<p align="RIGHT"><font style="nonprinting">-<i>Lawrence Mishel</i></font></p>
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<p><font style="nonprinting">He wants to raise the minimum wage, fund a third round of empowerment zones for midsize cities, double federal research spending on information technology and cancer research, provide tax credits for firms that train workers for high-tech jobs, and provide states with grants to create "opportunity academies" for disadvantaged high school graduates who need more help before attend ing college. Gore wants to increase the standard deduction for joint filers (as a way of addressing the marriage penalty) and increase the Earned Income Tax Credit for married couples. In early September, he waded back into the health care swamp where Clinton's presidency nearly ran aground: Gore issued his proposal to expand the children's health program to cover more children and, even more importantly, as many as seven million of their parents in working-poor families. Also in the mix were 25-percent refundable tax credits to encourage small businesses to cover their workers and to help uninsured indi viduals purchase their own insurance. That wouldn't add up to universal health care, but- atop the existing children's insurance program- Gore aides estimated it could provide coverage to as many as 11- 15 million of the 43 million uninsured. </font></p>
<p> </p>
<p><font style="nonprinting"><font color="darkred"><b>Caps Off?</b></font> </font></p>
<p><font style="nonprinting">To the frustration of Gore's staff, his activism has drawn relatively little attention, even among liberal groups ostensibly most focused on the race. "I think in this early game most people who are going to be called upon to vote in the Democratic primaries and in the general election are not parsing the proposals that carefully," says Roger Hickey, co- director of the Campaign for America's Future, the new umbrella liberal group. Very few criticize Gore's specific ideas; as with Clinton, the debate on the left is whether they go far enough. </font></p>
<p><font style="nonprinting">Envelope-pushers like Ruy Teixeira, a sharp-eyed analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, complain that Gore's proposals still accept the basic framework of fiscal austerity that Clinton has pursued. "I certainly think that he is trying to spin out a variety of specific ideas- but on the other hand I'm not sure they amount to much on the scaleometer," he says. "I don't see it as being a big break from the kind of small-bore Clinton style of activism." The trickiest question here is cost. Even with all good intentions, he asks, how can Gore pay for his ideas within the current straightjacket of domestic spending caps and balanced budgets? Publicly Gore hasn't provided much of an answer, but the components of one emerge from conversation with his aides. The baseline assumption of Gore's advisers is that Congress and Clinton will lift the spending caps before the next president takes office. </font></p>
<p><font style="nonprinting">"Whether or not it fits into the caps is almost a moot point," says the senior Gore adviser. After that, Gore's camp is looking to pay for their program- at least in the sense of making it add up on paper- largely by dipping into the $540 billion Clinton wants to set aside through 2014 for subsidized retirement savings accounts, the so-called Universal Savings Accounts. There are still other problems with the math- notably that the surplus estimates on which all these calculations are based assume a continued cap on domestic spending that would necessitate large cuts in the years ahead. But Gore's camp, like virtually everyone else in Washington, assumes that the economy will continue to throw off more revenue than is now forecast, easing that squeeze. </font></p>
<p><font style="nonprinting">In effect Gore would stretch but not shatter the current consensus on federal spending. Some liberals, at least, consider Gore's approach a sensible balance between aspiration and plausibility. Ronald Pollack, vice president and executive director of the health care advocacy group Families USA, was on the front lines of the battle over Clinton's 1994 plan for universal health care. He gives Gore high marks for his health care proposal, even though it falls considerably short of Clinton's. </font></p>
<p><font style="nonprinting">"What Gore did was something that was truly practical and is very, very substantial: this was not a token thing," Pollack says. "Obviously, for organizations like ours . . . it's our number one, two, and three priority to get to universal coverage. And we'd like to do it next week. But having gone through these fights now for many, many iterations and over many years, I have a somewhat greater appreciation for doing something significant that is achievable rather than beating my breast in support of the whole enchilada and getting nothing." </font></p>
<p><font style="nonprinting">Still, Gore has plenty of problems with the activist left. Some believe the party needs a fresh face untainted by the Clinton scandals. Others consider Gore's campaign excessively buttoned up and corporate. (He has no less than six pollsters on staff, leading one comic to recently declare that it's not known who tells Gore what to think on the seventh day.) "There is very little sense with Gore that it's a campaign that is inviting grass-roots people in," says Hickey. </font></p>
<p><font style="nonprinting">Though his campaign apparatus is more informal, Bradley isn't necessarily a much more congenial fit. While he is emphasizing liberal themes now, based on his congressional record, "Most people don't see Bradley as their champion on the left," notes Hickey. Pollack, for one, complains that for all his current talk about universal coverage, Bradley was AWOL during the Senate fight on Clinton's plan in 1994. ("Where the hell was he in '93 and '94? Bradley just was not around," he says.) </font></p>
<p><font style="nonprinting">And even Teixeira, while applauding Bradley's critique of Clintonism, worries that the former senator's aggressive social liberalism on issues like welfare reform "could kill Bradley [in a general election]. If there is too much emphasis on too many relics of the old liberal left . . . he is going to get hammered." In the end, though Bradley is making inroads among local activists, most elected officials and national institutions identified with the left- like the AFL-CIO- are likely to eventually side with Gore. </font></p>
<p> </p>
<p><font style="nonprinting">At times this debate among Democrats about whether Gore or Bradley would go far enough in pur suing new federal programs can seem as oxygen-deprived as an argument between Steve Forbes and Gary Bauer over who is most committed to an immediate ban on abortion. In practice there are real obstacles to the ability of either Democrat to deliver on an activist agenda, at least in the near term, should he be nominated and elected. For one thing, the 1997 budget deal still constrains public outlay. For another, it is all but impossible for the Democrats to take back the Senate in 2000, and even a Democratic House would likely be closely divided between the parties, with dozens of conservative Blue Dogs and New Democrats limiting activism within the Democratic caucus. Public attitudes are also contradictory and ambivalent on the subject of activist government. </font></p>
<p><font style="nonprinting">Polls show that voters, simultaneously, are supportive of more public outlay for such favored purposes as education and health but still generally skeptical of Washington's ability to do what's right most of the time. In the abstract, voters also prefer smaller to larger government. Public opinion is capable of breaking either way on the issue of government activism, depend ing on which side effectively frames the debate. </font></p>
<p><font style="nonprinting">Yet the Democratic contenders are pressured to challenge that ambivalence, both by their own competition and by Bush's turn away from the antigovernment rhetoric that's characterized congressional Repub licans. There's undoubtedly a risk in offering more Washington activism than the voters will accept. But to create contrasts with a Republican nominee seeking the center, Gore or Bradley will have to skate much closer to that edge than Clinton has been willing to do for years. </font></p>
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</div></div></div>Wed, 19 Dec 2001 19:15:54 +0000140807 at https://prospect.orgRonald BrownsteinThe Successor Generationhttps://prospect.org/article/successor-generation
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><font class="nonprinting"><b><font color="darkred" size="+3">A</font></b>s a democracy," historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., once insisted, "the United States ought presumably to be able to dispense with dynastic families." </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Well, you'd never know it by looking at the November ballot. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">This is shaping up as a banner year for candidates with marquee names. From Maine to Texas, and from Florida to California, the sons and daughters of politicians—and in some cases, the grandsons and granddaughters of politicians—are lining up for a shot at the family business. Given all that's gone on in Washington over the past year, this might be a time when sensible young people might consider, say, bridge construction or mine detonation to be careers with better long-term prospects than elected office. But instead, the list of second- and third-generation politicians trying to prove Schlesinger wrong is growing to a formidable length.</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">In Indiana, Evan Bayh, the son of former Democratic Senator Birch Bayh, is heavily favored to win a Senate seat. Democratic cousins Tom Udall (the son of former Representative Stewart Udall) and Mark Udall (the son of former Representative Morris Udall) are running for House seats in New Mexico and Colorado respectively. In Pennsylvania, Pat Casey, the son of former Democratic Governor Bob Casey, is bidding for a House seat; in Louisiana, Democrat Marjorie McKeithen, the granddaughter of a former Democratic Louisiana governor—and the daughter of the state's Republican secretary of state—is also trying to get in the door of the House. So are Democrats Janice Hahn in California (whose father was long a powerful Los Angeles County supervisor) and Don Bevill in Alabama, who is running for the seat that his father, Tom Bevill, represented until he retired two years ago. In Texas, Charlie Gonzalez has a virtual lock on the seat being vacated this year by his father, Democratic Representative Henry Gonzalez.</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">In Maine, Republican James Longley, Jr., a former congressman, is likewise trying to move into the gubernatorial chair occupied some 20 years ago by his father. By November, former President George Bush is likely to have sons running two of the nation's four largest states: Jeb Bush is heavily favored in his second attempt at the governorship in Florida, and his older brother George W. Bush is cruising toward a landslide re-election as governor in Texas. In Connecticut, Representative Barbara Kennelly, the daughter of the state's legendary Democratic boss John Bailey, is waging an uphill fight as the Democratic nominee for governor. In Minnesota, the trend reached a weird peak when Democrats this September were treated to a my-three-sons gubernatorial primary pitting the offspring of Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, and Orville Freeman. Lower down on the state ballots, Iowa voters have the chance to elect Chet Culver, the son of former Democratic Senator John Culver, as secretary of state; George Wallace, Jr., is running as a Republican for a seat on the Alabama Public Service Commission; and in Texas, Democrats see a future top-of-the-ticket name in state comptroller nominee Paul Hobby, the son of a former lieutenant governor and the grandson of a former governor.</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">That groaning list doesn't even include all the incumbent successor-generation politicians on the ballot this year—Senators Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Judd Gregg (the son of a former governor) in New Hampshire; Maryland Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend; and representatives like Jesse Jackson, Jr., Harold Ford, Jr., Patrick Kennedy (the son of Senator Edward Kennedy), Lucille Roybal-Allard (who holds a California seat once held by her father), John Sununu (the son of the New Hampshire governor who proved that it doesn't take a winning personality to win elected office), and even crusty John Dingell, who since 1955 has represented the seat once held by his father. Nor does it include those whose positions have been gained via appointment, like Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Andrew Cuomo (whose father is former New York Governor Mario). Nor, finally, does it include all the successor-generation incumbents who don't have a race this year, including Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu (whose father was mayor of New Orleans), West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller (two of whose uncles were governors), and Chicago Mayor Richard Daley (whose father was emperor).</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting"><b>The Power of Pedigree</b></font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Dynastic politics, of course, isn't a new development, as Brookings Institution political scientist Stephen Hess chronicled in his encyclopedic book <i>America's Political Dynasties</i> (the source for much of the history that follows). The sixth president, John Quincy Adams, was the son of the second, John Adams (and was every bit as dour, inflexible, and unsuccessful as his father). President Benjamin Harrison was the grandson of President William Henry Harrison, who himself could trace a line of elected ancestors back to 1632. In the Progressive Era, LaFollettes were as common as cows in Wisconsin. Two of Franklin Roosevelt's sons got themselves elected to Congress. The line of Cincinnati Tafts in national politics runs from an attorney general (Alphonso Taft), to a president (William Howard Taft), to a senator (Robert A. Taft), to another senator (Robert Taft, Jr.) to the current Ohio secretary of state, Robert A. Taft II, who calls himself Bob and happens to be the GOP's gubernatorial candidate this year.</font></p>
<hr size="1" /><center><font class="nonprinting"><a href="/subscribe/"><img alt="Subscribe to The American Prospect" border="0" src="/tapads/mini_subscribe.gif" /></a> </font></center><br /><hr size="1" /><p><font class="nonprinting">But if it isn't new, the trend seems unusually dense about now. And in 2000 it is heading toward a crescendo—with the possibility of the first all second-generation presidential race in American history between senator's son Al Gore and George W. Bush, the son of a president who was himself the son of a senator. The prospect of a Gore and a Bush leading both national parties into the new century speaks volumes about the enduring power of pedigree in a society that supposedly apportions its rewards by the impartial calculus of merit.</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Of course, America doesn't entirely apportion its rewards by merit in any field. There are still not many more important things a child can do to secure his future than taking the care to be born to the right parents. Scouring the country for the best and the brightest, Ivy League schools always manage to find more than their share of freshmen who can recognize their family names on the buildings along the quad. A lawyer whose mother was a nurse embodies the American dream; but it's still more common to meet lawyers whose parents were lawyers. That's not to say many of those in America's corner offices haven't displayed ability and tenacity and commitment; it's just to acknowledge that it's easier to climb to the penthouse from the fiftieth floor than the basement. In that sense, politics is no different.</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">In many ways, politics is less of a game rigged at birth than most aspects of American life. Running for office can be a profoundly leveling experience. Wealth is no guarantee of success (ask Al Checchi), and neither is a famous name. Franklin Roosevelt's sons Jimmy and Franklin, Jr., both failed when they tried to spring from the House to governorships. John Quincy Adams is still the only president's son to make it to the Oval Office; until now, no other president's son besides Robert A. Taft was even a serious contender for the job—and he was denied the Republican presidential nomination on three separate tries. Hubert H. Humphrey III was crushed when he tried to follow his father into the U.S. Senate in 1988; Kathleen Brown was trounced when she tried to follow her father and brother into the governor's mansion in California in 1994; and Douglas LaFollette, who carried a pretty good name in Wisconsin, nonetheless lost a Democratic primary for a House seat in 1996. Gary King, whose father had been New Mexico's governor, wanted to follow him, but finished out of the money in a Democratic primary this June.</font></p>
<p> </p>
<p><font class="nonprinting"><b><font color="darkred" size="+3">I</font></b>n some ways, a famous name can even be an obstacle. Successor-generation politicians can have a hard time even getting in the door with voters who disliked their parents. George W. Bush speaks for many of his contemporaries when he says of his father: "I've inherited half his friends and all his enemies." Successor pols can also have trouble convincing voters that they are not just trying to cash in on their parents' reputation. Albert Gore, Sr., once recalled that Al Gore, Jr., pushed away his help in his first House race because he did not want to be seen as "my father's candidate." In 1990, Bush wanted to run for statewide office in Texas and maybe even governor, but was convinced not to, largely out of fear that voters would think he was trying to cut in line because his father was president. When Jesse Jackson, Jr., was elected to the House in 1995 at the age of 30, he had to overcome charges that his father would control his vote. "What the name does in the mind of some people is it raises the threshold of credibility," says Evan Bayh, who won two terms as governor in Indiana before seeking the Senate seat this year. "They want to know is this person doing it because they are genuinely talented and genuinely interesting and have something to offer, or are they just running on their family name?" There's nothing new about that problem: after Theodore Roosevelt's son announced for a New York State Assembly seat in 1919, his opponent jibed, "My hat's in the ring too—and it isn't my father's."</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">It's worth remembering, of course, that Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., won that race. And even all of the losers listed just above won other elections, most of them for statewide positions. Which is to say that while a famous pedigree doesn't assure victory, it does provide a huge advantage. It's no coincidence that many of the second-generation politicians win their first elections at remarkably young ages. Patrick Kennedy was the youngest member of the House—until Harold Ford, Jr., was. Evan Bayh was the nation's youngest governor when he was elected to the job in Indiana in 1988. Mary Landrieu was the youngest female state legislator in the history of Louisiana.</font></p>
<p> </p>
<p><font class="nonprinting"><b><font color="darkred" size="+3">F</font></b>or these candidates, the advantages begin literally at birth. Second-generation politicians grow up steeped in politics. Marjorie McKeithen, the Democratic congressional candidate in Louisiana, lived as a child in the governor's mansion when her grandfather John served there; she ran her father's first campaign for secretary of state when she had just graduated from college. At 18, George W. Bush got his first look at Texas politics as a "stagehand" and advance man for his father's senate campaign. Evan Bayh campaigned in Iowa and New Hampshire and Massachusetts when his father ran for president in 1976 and managed his father's last (losing) campaign for the Senate in 1980. The successor-generation politicians listen and learn. When it comes their turn to run—or, for that matter, to govern—they are usually far more comfortable in the arena than typical first-time candidates.</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Then there are the practical advantages to a good political pedigree. When looking to fill key spots on the ballot, local political leaders often seek out the sons and daughters of former party heroes. ("People just assumed that I might have an interest in it," says McKeithen of the steady stream of Democrats who encouraged her to run for office.) That may be partly because local leaders have been personally exposed to the talents of the sons and daughters of famous politicians; but usually more important is the awareness that rank-and-file voters remember their family names. As it becomes more difficult—and expensive—for candidates to make themselves known to an increasingly distracted electorate, the value of a name that is already known rises enormously too. (It speaks volumes that most of the second-generation politicians run in the same states where their parents were successful.) In that sense, the successor-generation phenomenon is best understood as part of a larger trend. Like the growing number of self-financed millionaire candidates and the steady stream of celebrity candidates (from sports stars like J. C. Watts and Steve Largent to entertainers like the late Sonny Bono), the proliferation of second-generation candidates is another reflection of how the high cost of becoming known is tilting the electoral playing field against ordinary citizens, particularly at the statewide level, where the ante for a serious campaign is greatest. In a world of $40 million primaries, just about the only way to succeed is to start well known, or to start with the means of acquiring the money it takes to become well known.</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Typically the successor-generation politicians start off with both of these. Mom's or Dad's friends—and more importantly, their financial contributors—provide an instant network of support unimaginable for other political newcomers. Even Jerry Brown, who cringed at the clubby back-scratching Irish politics of his father Pat Brown, relied enormously on his father's network to fund his first gubernatorial campaign in 1974. "As much as Jerry recoiled at a lot of the fundraising techniques of the earlier days and gritted his teeth about the personalities that surrounded his father, it was undeniable that he had an enormous advantage in tapping into those sources," says pollster Richard B. Maullin, a longtime aide to Jerry Brown.</font></p>
<p> </p>
<p><font class="nonprinting"><b><font color="darkred" size="+3">F</font></b>acing all of that, the candidates across the ballot from successor-generation politicians often feel like they are running against not a single opponent, but an en tire battalion. Consider the case of Kevin Vigilante, the Republican whom Patrick Kennedy defeated when he was first elected to the House in 1994. On paper, Vigilante was a good match: an emergency-room physician who worked with female prison inmates infected with HIV, he was moderate and energetic. Kennedy, at the time, was 27 and had held no job except serving in the Rhode Island House of Representatives (to which he had been elected while in college). But even in the best Republican year in a generation, Kennedy swept past Vigilante. "There are some really big challenges to running against a Kennedy," says Vigilante. "Their access to media, their mythological status, their access to money—all of those things are there with a wave of the hand really." The Kennedys' mythological status in New England may be unmatched, but anyone running against a Daley in Chicago, a Long in Louisiana, or a Bush in Texas could say much the same thing.</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting"><b>Father Knows Best</b></font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">In fact, if George W. Bush decides to seek the presidency next year, his campaign will provide a kind of laboratory experiment in the advantages and perils of successor-generation politics. In that, he's a contrast to Gore. Gore's father, a progressive Democratic senator from Tennessee who last held office in 1970, has receded far enough into memory that he won't affect his son's presidential bid one way or the other. For better and worse, Bill Clinton is Gore's political father.</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">But memories of Bush's father are vivid enough that they will inevitably affect his campaign, both positively and negatively. On the positive side, George W. Bush is already benefiting from widespread name recognition that's boosting his lead in early polls of Republican preferences for 2000. And if Bush decides to run, he'll instantly inherit a national network of political operatives and fundraisers who supported his father. "You've got probably 30,000 people across the country: those people will raise money for you, they will do all that stuff for you," says Bush's cousin John Ellis, a <i>Boston Globe </i>contributor. "That's the only real political network that exists in the Republican Party."</font></p>
<p> </p>
<p><font class="nonprinting"><b><font color="darkred" size="+3">T</font></b>he problem for Bush is that that isn't all he'll inherit. He'll also inherit the doubts about his father among conservative activists—especially religious conservatives—who carry a big stick in the Republican presidential primaries. He'll inherit the sense among less ideological voters that his father didn't understand the stressful realities of modern family life. ("The biggest hurdle for us," says one top advisor to George W., "is does he get it . . . is he clued in to reality?") And he'll inherit the particular antipathy toward his father among New Hampshire Republicans who still seethe over the old man's seeming obliviousness to the recession of the early 1990s.</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">These worries are tangible enough that the key Texas advisors to Bush the younger are trying to prevent his father's cronies from muscling into the most visible campaign roles if the son runs for president. That reflects their self-interest, of course, but also the legitimate political fear that voters won't be particularly enthused if George W.'s campaign looks like an effort to restore the Bush administration.</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Avoiding that impression might be easier for Bush because he is defined to the public much more by his differences from than his similarities with his father. As much as Bush the elder was stiff and preppy, the son is relaxed and folksy. In fact, many—if not most—of the successor-generation politicians are defined more by the differences than the similarities with their parents. Jerry Brown presented himself as the antithesis of his father—the monk to Pat Brown's barkeep. Evan Bayh is as much a Clintonite moderate as his father, Birch Bayh, was a Great Society liberal. Al Gore, Sr., was impulsive and engaging, a onetime square-dance caller who campaigned with a hillbilly band in the 1930s, played the fiddle, and took emphatic political risks—like opposing the Vietnam War. His son is calculated and buttoned-down, a man who examines policy problems as if they were mathematical equations to be solved and rarely puts down his foot without carefully examining every blade of grass below. "Al by nature is more of a pragmatist than his father," his mother Pauline told the <i>Los Angeles Times</i> during her son's 1988 presidential campaign.</font></p>
<p> </p>
<p><font class="nonprinting"><b><font color="darkred" size="+3">C</font></b>hanging circumstances explain many of these contrasts. Al Gore, Sr., grew up on a farm in Tennessee and attended a one-room grade school; his son grew up in a hotel on Embassy Row in Washington and attended the exclusive St. Albans School. The Bushes went in the opposite direction: the father grew up in leafy Greenwich; the son in dusty Midland. Changing times play a role, too: George W. is more conservative than his father largely because he came into politics at a time when his entire party was tilting to the right. Evan Bayh and Al Gore are more centrist than their fathers largely because they absorbed the critique of traditional liberalism that emerged after their fathers left the stage. (Of the ideological differences with his father, Evan Bayh quite persuasively says, "What would be truly remarkable is if 30 years later our ideas about how to meet the challenges hadn't changed. It seems to me perfectly natural that as the world has changed over the past three decades, so has our approach to government.") Biology counts too. The successor generations aren't clones of their political parents; they're blends of both their parents. It's easy to see in George W. Bush his mother's tart irreverence, or in Gore, the more pragmatic impulses of his mother. ("I tried to persuade Al [Sr.] not to butt at a stone wall, just for the sheer joy of butting," she once said.)</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">But the generational contrasts in political families involve more than circumstance or biology or time. There's another factor: many of the successor politicians seem to learn more from their parents' failures than their successes. Once again, Bush is instructive. His admiration for his father is enormous (the son praised the father so lavishly at the dedication of his presidential library that many took it as a slight at Clinton). But it's the weaknesses in his father's approach to politics that appear to have left the strongest impression on George W. The father tended to govern by leafing through his in-box; the son is insistent on trying to control the political debate and define the agenda for his state on issues such as welfare and education. George W. says, "There is a difference in a way. The concept of service is a very strong concept that was passed on from my dad's father to him; you served. I feel that as well. But on the other hand, I think you've got to have a reason to go into the political process. You've got to have a vision." </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">In his father's crushing loss in 1992, the son says, "I did learn a lesson about incumbency . . . you can't [just] defend your record. There has to be a what next."</font></p>
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<p><font class="nonprinting"><b><font color="darkred" size="+3">R</font></b>epresentative Jesse Jackson, Jr., provides another variation on the theme. Unlike Bush, or Gore, or Bayh, Representative Jackson hasn't migrated from his father's ideology. If anything, representing a district that sprawls from the South Side of Chicago into hardscrabble suburbs south of the city, he may be even more aggressively liberal than his father. While the father has grown closer to Clinton over time, Jackson, Jr., is a fierce critic of the President—whom he considers (along with Gore) an advocate of a neo-confederate state's rights agenda that abandons the tradition of a powerful federal government (a tradition he traces back to Lincoln) moving to solve national problems. "We need a more perfect union, and these guys don't believe in a more perfect union," says Jackson, Jr., an ebullient and engaging 33-year-old who has inherited his father's tendency toward monologue. "They believe in more perfect state's rights. But local governments cannot resolve the health care crisis in America. Local governments cannot resolve the affordable housing problem in America." Jackson, Jr., strongly argues for his father to challenge Al Gore in the Democratic presidential primaries in 2000.</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Yet in the way he operates, Jackson, Jr., is a study in contrasts with his father. Reverend Jackson is peripatetic; Representative Jack son turns down almost all speaking requests and doggedly returns to his district on weekends. Reverend Jack son's presidential campaigns were famously disorganized; Representative Jackson spent the first $37,000 he raised in 1995 on computer and communications technology and surprised his rivals with a sophisticated voter contact and turnout program. Reverend Jackson isn't known for attention to detail; like a South Side Al D'Amato, Representative Jackson works diligently to squeeze out federal dollars for nuts-and-bolts local improvements like signs pointing motorists to gas and food from the two interstates that cut through his district. Representative Jackson's overwhelming priority is winning funding for a third Chicago airport that would be built in his district—a project on which he is so focused that he has refused to endorse the Democratic gubernatorial nominee because the nominee has refused to support the plan.</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Biology and circumstance may explain many of these differences (Jackson, Jr., says he inherited his instinct for organization from his mother, and a young representative who didn't spend weekends in his district might soon have more time on his hands than he'd like). But Jackson, Jr., is also acutely conscious of the difficulty his father has had in trying to be seen as a leader for more than just African Americans, even though he has been emphasizing broader progressive themes at least since his 1988 presidential campaign. The son is insistently focused on being defined to his constituents—and ultimately the country at large—primarily as an advocate for economic, not racial, equity. "So I am very sensitive about what media I engage and on what subject I choose to engage it," Jackson, Jr., says. "Because 10 or 15 years from now I'd like all Americans to think of me as someone who fights for everybody and not let the sum total of a lot of press articles be 'Rodney King.'"</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Given all of the advantages successor-generation politicians enjoy, maybe the story isn't how many, but how few, now hold positions of power. In some countries, the phenomenon seems even more common. Gerald Curtis, an expert on Japanese politics at Columbia University, says that between 40 and 50 percent of the incumbent Diet members in the ruling Liberal-Democratic Party are the sons or sons-in-law of former Diet members. In just half a century of existence, India has been led by three generations of Nehrus—India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, his daughter Indira, and her son Rajiv. In the United States, nonpoliticians usually exceed politicians even in the most political families. Though it sometimes seems otherwise, even most Kennedys don't pursue political careers.</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting"><b>Family Politics</b></font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Explaining why some children of politicians run and others run away pushes you smack into the mystery of why families turn out the way they do. Nature, undoubtedly, is part of it: in his book on political dynasties, Stephen Hess reports that young Robert A. Taft was "rapt" at his father's presidential inauguration, while his brother brought along a copy of <i>Treasure Island</i>. But the way that young people react to their environment may matter even more. Growing up in a political family can be exhilarating, but also oppressive. It means expectations, exposure, and scrutiny for young people who'd often prefer to be left alone. It's hard to imagine that the events of the past year have Chelsea Clinton dreaming of becoming the first woman president. "It can be a hell of a burden to be a young Adams or a young Roosevelt or a young Kennedy," says Hess.</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">In the end, the children in political families who run are those who find the opportunities greater than the burdens—a calculation that even in the same circumstances can differ for each member of a family. Evan Bayh, who met Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson as a child, says, "In my case, I found it to be inspirational. . . . But if that's not consistent with your own value set about what you find to be rewarding, and what you want to accomplish with your own life, and hopefully on behalf of others, you are not going to follow that path."</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">That the path is open at all to so many children of politicians still raises hackles in a society that recoils from the idea of hereditary advantage. It's undeniable that some of the successor-generation politicians have risen faster, and further, than they would have without an ancestral boost. Maullin, the Santa Monica–based Democratic pollster, marveled when Kathleen Brown rose to become the Democratic gubernatorial nominee in California four years ago. He says, "She is a bright woman, well-meaning, but I can walk around this office complex and find at least a dozen women who personality-wise are no different than her, but would have no chance of being a political figure whatsoever." </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Brown was, in many ways, an engaging and attractive candidate, but that doesn't diminish the power of Maullin's conclusion: born to a different family, she, like more than a few of her second-generation contemporaries, probably never would have found herself on the top of a ticket.</font></p>
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<p><font class="nonprinting"><b><font color="darkred" size="+3">T</font></b>he comparison to baseball—another American institution with more than its share of father-son succession—is instructive. In baseball, questions of fairness rarely arise when the sons of former players make it to the major leagues. Ken Griffey, Jr., or Barry Bonds may have received more attention from scouts early on because their fathers were talented major leaguers, but ultimately they had to prove their worth on the field, under the same rules as everyone else. Pete Rose, Jr.'s name earned him a look, too, but it wasn't enough to lift him out of the minor leagues. In the end, no one doubts that Griffey or Bonds succeeded not because of their names, but because of their skills.</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">That can't be said as definitively in politics. The advantages for a Bush or a Gore can make the playing field uneven (as if pitchers facing Bonds or Griffey had to throw from a lower mound). No successor-generation politician can say as confidently as a successor-generation athlete that he succeeded entirely on his own. Yet, even in politics, the successor generation seems to rise to its natural level, the Rose, Jr.'s going one way, the Griffey, Jr.'s another. "A family name," says Hess, "is usually worth one rung up on the ladder. After that you are on your own." Remember even two of Franklin Roosevelt's sons—bearing arguably the century's most revered political name—still slipped when they tried to reach for the higher rungs. No one will cede the Republican presidential nomination to George W. Bush in 2000 just because his father twice won it.</font></p>
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<p><font class="nonprinting"><b><font color="darkred" size="+3">T</font></b>he dynastic process isn't entirely benign: in principle, a political system that increasingly rewards candidates with an external advantage not inherently linked to qualification for the job—a respected family name, a famous name, or a big bank account—is evolving away from the ideal of a representative government equally open to all. But compared to the other forms of unearned political advantage (wealth and fame), family ties have proved in practice to be the least objectionable. The successor generation has produced some of the most talented and effective officeholders in America. Maybe some are just looking to cash in on their parents' renown. But somewhere near the core of their attraction to politics, almost all of the successor-generation candidates can locate a memory like that of Marjorie McKeithen, who remembers watching "my grandfather [the governor] speak to crowds, seeing the conviction in his face, hearing the big booming voice." Embedded in those memories is the most unambiguously admirable quality of the second-generation politicians: their shared conviction, learned around the dinner table, that public service is a worthwhile, even a noble, calling. It's not as if that sentiment is so widespread today that we can afford to disqualify from political life everyone whose last name has already appeared on a bumper sticker.</font></p>
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</div></div></div>Wed, 19 Dec 2001 19:15:54 +0000140896 at https://prospect.orgRonald BrownsteinGreen Light, Red Lighthttps://prospect.org/article/green-light-red-light
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><i>See the <a href="/print/V12/20/hunter-na.html">Sidebar: Immigrants on Campus</a> by Natasha Hunter</i><br /></p><hr width="400" /><p><br /></p><p><span class="dropcap">M</span>aybe the best measure of the deteriorating prospects for fundamental immigration reform after the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon came at a congressional hearing on, of all things, airport security. Amid the debate over arming pilots, deploying sky marshals on commercial flights, or turning over airport security to the federal government, Republican Congressman Harold Rogers of Kentucky had another concern. Why, he wondered, was there no requirement that the men and women who monitor the checkpoints screening passengers hold American citizenship?<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>How remarkable is that thought? Today even the U.S. military doesn't require soldiers to be citizens. It accepts immigrants who are permanent legal residents--that is, those who have obtained a green card and are allowed to remain in the United States indefinitely. But to Rogers, that didn't seem a tight enough standard for luggage screeners.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Rogers's question captured the sudden, lurching, shift in Washington's attitude toward immigrants and immigration reform. Until the September 11 attacks, the forces appeared to be aligning for a grand bargain between business and labor, Democrats and Republicans, that would allow undocumented immigrants to work legally in the United States and guestworkers to migrate freely and openly into America. Now, open borders appear about as attractive as open cockpits. Across party lines, Washington's principal immigration concern has understandably become preventing terrorists from slipping into the country. Indeed, Rogers's question suggested a new level of suspicion aimed even at immigrants who are here legally but have not yet gone through the process to become full-fledged citizens--a group also targeted by some of the administration's post-attack proposals to allow indefinite detention of suspected terrorists. That's hardly the political climate in which to discuss legalizing large numbers of people who entered the United States illegally. "The option is just completely out of the room right now," says one Senate Democratic leadership aide. "Progressive immigration policy is just another casualty of the attacks of September 11."<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>In the short run, that's undeniable. Adding to the burden created by the attacks, reform advocates have been hurt by the slowdown in the economy. That's sapped the principal political engine for a new approach to immigration: the fears of a labor shortage among American service industries like hotels and restaurants. "Short-term, the pressure has disappeared for the most part," says John Gay, co-chairman of the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition, a business group that supports reform. "When you are talking about laying people off, there is no worker shortage."<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Yet for all of these immediate obstacles, the long-term dynamics encouraging a new approach to immigration remain in place. Once the economy revives, business's demand for new workers will also recover--and with it the demand for some sort of guestworker program. "The long-term demographics haven't changed--the aging of the workforce, the need for more people to come in," says Gay. That hunger for new workers has made business groups like Gay's more willing to consider favorably the basic labor protections that Democrats and the unions would demand in any guestworker program. Led by service-sector unions like the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International, organized labor remains committed to legalization because it has come to see new immigrants less as a threat to American jobs than as a current and potential source of new members. The rapidly growing number of Hispanic migrants in the pews ensures that the Catholic Church will continue to push for legalization. And the enormous increase in the Hispanic population means that politicians in both parties--starting with President Bush--will continue to search for initiatives that can appeal to that community. Indeed, on several occasions since the attacks, administration officials have insisted that Bush still wants to advance sweeping immigration reform. "The president is still committed to honoring his promise to work with . . . [Mexican President Vicente] Fox on immigration changes," White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer told reporters several days after the September calamity. Other officials say staff-level negotiations over a reform plan continue with Mexico.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>But it's clear that if immigration reform happens at all, it will occur later than it would have without the attacks. And it's likely to be more narrowly targeted and more focused on security. Above all, it's virtually certain to be more heavily shaped by Bush's preferences than it would have been without the tragedy. "Bush has to be the guy who leads us there," says Angela Kelley, deputy director of the National Immigration Forum, an immigrant-advocacy group. "Because it can't be the advocacy community saying, 'Forget what happened in New York.'"<br /></p><p><span class="dropcap">S</span>een through the dust and debris, the shock and horror, of September 11, Fox's recent visit to the United States now seems as if it occurred in another lifetime. But in fact, Fox left Washington less than a week before the hijackers struck. And when he addressed Congress in a joint session, he had been received almost as enthusiastically as Bush was in his congressional address nine days after the attacks.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Fox's visit provided a badly needed burst of momentum to the immigration-reform movement. The immigration debate had been jump-started this summer, when participants in negotiations between the United States and Mexico had leaked reports that the two nations were considering the most ambitious changes in U.S. immigration laws since the amnesty signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986. According to the initial accounts, the two sides were weighing a grand bargain that would create a guestworker program to import new employees for American businesses, along with a system that would allow millions of Mexicans already working in the United States illegally to move toward legal status over a period of years--a process known as "earned legalization."<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Almost immediately, though, the administration began to backpedal. Under fire from conservatives who considered any legalization plan a "reward for lawbreakers," administration officials began to suggest that reform might take years. In his public comments, Bush consistently downplayed the portion of the discussions focused on illegal workers already in the United States while stressing his desire for a new guestworker program: the portion of the package most attractive to Republicans and the business community. "When we find willing employer and willing employee, we ought to match the two," Bush said. "We ought to make it easier for people who want to employ somebody, who are looking for workers, to be able to hire people who want to work."<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>In terms of timing as well as scope, Fox's visit appeared to put the reform effort back on track. Fox surprised Bush by publicly calling on the United States to reach an agreement with Mexico on migration by year's end; Bush never committed entirely to that goal, but he was forced to say that he would work as quickly as he could. And the final communiqué the two sides released after the visit made clear that the talks would cover not only a plan for future guestworkers but also "the status of undocumented Mexicans in the United States." Indeed, answering questions from reporters with Fox at his side, Bush said for the first time that he was "willing to consider ways for a guestworker to earn green-card status."<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Bush's comments acknowledged the underlying political reality of the immigration debate. Since Congress is so closely divided, neither the business community nor organized labor can pass its top immigration priority without concession to the other side. The Democratic Senate, backed by the unions, would surely block any effort simply to create a new guestworker program while denying worker protections to those laborers. The Republican House, backed by business, would just as surely derail any plan focused solely on legalizing illegal immigrants already here. Only a bill that combined both ideas had even a chance of building a coalition broad enough to pass. One senior White House adviser acknowledged as much on the last day of Fox's visit. "There has to be a nexus between temporary workers and a route to a green card," the aide told me. "Otherwise, the temporary-worker program is a dead letter."<br /></p><p><span class="dropcap">B</span>ut the attacks scrambled the political equation by adding an entirely new concern: domestic security. Investigators have reported that several of the 19 hijackers had overstayed the visas allowing them to enter the United States. Attorney General John Ashcroft later reported that 98 of the first 352 suspects apprehended in the investigation were detained on visa violations. And around the country, airports began to round up dozens of employees with improper immigration papers.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Almost inevitably, the immigration discussion in Washington shifted away from legalizing illegal migrants toward cracking down on them. Although the exact parameters remain under debate, the Justice Department appears certain to receive expanded power to detain even legal immigrants who are suspected of terrorist links. And legislation is pending that would require the federal government and other institutions--particularly colleges and universities--to keep better tabs on temporary residents who overstay their visas. Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California thinks that the system for tracking student visas is so fundamentally broken that she's proposed a six-month moratorium on issuing any more.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>All of this is casting a huge shadow over the legalization debate. The most common image of an illegal immigrant is someone who crosses the desert from Mexico. But of the roughly eight million undocumented immigrants in the United States, the best estimates suggest that around 40 percent are people who have simply overstayed their visas and never left. With the terrorist strikes, it became instantly implausible that Congress, or for that matter the country, would accept an amnesty plan that allowed many if not most of those visa violators to become legal residents. A national poll conducted after September 11 by John Zogby for the anti-immigration Center for Immigration Studies captured the changing environment: Three-fourths of Americans said the government wasn't doing enough to control the border, and nearly as many said it should greatly increase the resources it devotes to enforcing immigration laws.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>In this climate of increased vigilance and fear, if any immigration reform can be salvaged it's likely to look very different from what it would have otherwise. The most certain outcome is that any future plan will require much more intensive background checks and security clearances for future guestworkers and for illegal immigrants who might be allowed to move toward permanent status. Even with greater security safeguards, many participants privately question whether any plan that would legalize large numbers of illegal immigrants from Arab countries could win majority support any time soon. At the same time, it's hard to imagine Congress approving a plan that excludes only Arab countries from legalization. So the debate might lead back to where Bush preferred it in the first place: a legalization plan initially aimed solely at undocumented migrants from Mexico.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Ever since the administration first began discussing legalization, Democrats have demanded that it be accorded to "all immigrants regardless of country of origin," as the party's congressional leadership wrote in a letter to Bush this summer. Bush seemed to bend to those demands when he said he would consider including "all folks here" in any legalization. But the administration has always seemed most interested in Mexican immigrants, and the attacks by foreign agents from the Middle East might provide a powerful political rationale for reverting to that approach. Some reform advocates now quietly acknowledge that limiting the plan to Mexico would significantly reduce security concerns, whether they center on bringing in new guestworkers or legitimizing the illegal migrants who are already here. Angela Kelley notes that such an arrangement could even be structured as a "North American perimeter agreement" that would enlist greater cooperation from Mexico and Canada in screening for potential terrorists at their borders.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Even a narrower approach won't be easy to move through Congress any time soon. Representatives<br />
of other ethnic groups would surely object. A Mexico-only plan would still face the huge barrier of rising unemployment in this country. And a plan targeted solely toward Mexico would still draw fire as a security risk from those who are skeptical of legalization regardless of any limitations that might apply. Facing all of these new hurdles, even some of reform's staunchest advocates are resigned to waiting longer for action and deferring more to Bush on when and how to proceed. The president still has his own reasons to move forward: a desire to bolster Fox and a need to improve his own strength among Hispanic voters. But it looks as though the terrain of the immigration debate will be utterly reshaped by September's attacks. "You have nine million people here illegally who are contributing to the United States of America and a few hundred here illegally who want to destroy it," says John Gay. "That's a terrible problem to have to figure out a solution to."<br /></p><p></p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 19 Dec 2001 19:14:04 +0000142285 at https://prospect.orgRonald Brownstein